At The End Of Yourself

In the middle of the night, I wake up like I’ve been jolted like a cattle prod.

The feeling should be familiar to anyone who has experienced a phone call at a late hour, or heard a crash or sound from downstairs that disrupted dreaming.  It’s a disorienting, bewildered jolt, accompanied by the pervasive and immediate sense that something is wrong.

But there is no phone call, for me.  No noise.  Nothing instigates this but my body.

My heart beats so loudly I can hear it in my ears.  I can feel the adrenaline cycling, seeking an outlet.  Even as that adrenaline seeks to purge itself somehow—run get up move stretch lift something walk move—the stomach distress kicks in, the flip flop tightening that precedes a roller coaster drop.  Except there is no drop, so the tension doesn’t resolve.

I am hot and sweaty, tangled in blankets.  Everything itches.  I do the box breathing I know to do—1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4—but I’ve been doing so much deep breathing lately that my sternum and my chest ache like I’ve pulled a muscle.  I switch to another kind of breathing—even inhales and exhales.  My heart continues pounding.  I try grounding exercises that remind me of where I am.  I pick up my prayer beads and try to pray for other people, reasoning that focus outside myself might alleviate this mess.

Sometimes the practices make a dent, briefly.  Sometimes they don’t.  Even when they do and I emerge from the fog, it is with the most profound weariness and a dim sense that all the chaos could return at any moment.  I try to revel in the relief.  Or, sometimes, I just cry because I’m so embarrassed.

This is what happens to me in the weeks and days before I have to fly.

I don’t know why.  I’ve never had a traumatic experience on a plane per se.  Some turbulence, yes, some wild landings—all things I found horrifying at the time but that, in retrospect, God helped me to handle.  But I feared flying long before those experiences, and the deep anxiety I experience about air travel has gotten worse over the years.

Anxiety is not new to me generally.  I’ve always experienced it (albeit it in lesser forms) long before I knew what it was. When I was in elementary school my tiny panics—over a sleepover, over a field trip, over a presentation—caused me to spend nights awake in tears praying to God to help me somehow.  I got a reputation for motion sickness in elementary school because I threw up so much on trips out of what no one realized was sheer fear. 

When my first boyfriend dumped me in college, I had a sneaking sense that while every girl sobbed and listened to ridiculous sad songs, not every girl felt electrified and unable to sleep, or itched all the time, or had panic surges so intense she had to dig her fingernails into her palms to anchor herself to the real world.  On hot, panicked, itchy nights before presentations, it occurred to me maybe not everyone else was experiencing this in an undergrad class.

I write this so you’ll know: when I say “anxiety,” I mean something more than worry or fear. 

Aside from all the bonkers physical manifestations of it—nausea and loss of appetite, cattle-prod adrenaline, weepiness, brain fog, chest pain, numbness—the core of this feeling is a very real and overwhelming sense of imminent, impending doom.  If I could draw it, I would sketch out a long rectangle over my chest: side to side, with the center directly under my collarbone.  It falls like a thick cloud, and while it resides in a specific location physically, the pervasiveness of it turns world gray.  It is a feeling I otherwise only experience otherwise in my dreams: a feeling of certain demise, a shattering draining of light and joy.

I am fortunate that, for the most part, as a grown woman I experience this primarily and solely around travel and flying.  It doesn’t impact my day to day life profoundly. But even then, it can be crippling.  It certainly takes the fun out of preparing for trips for both me and my husband.  At best, it’s exhausting, a perpetual force I have to wearily fight off with a thousand different coping techniques.  At worst, it cuts me off from opportunities when I succumb to it and cancel flights; makes me feel small and stupid; makes me ashamed I am not a better person, wife, Christian.

How can I believe what I believe, and feel this way?

Research tells us now, of course, that anxiety can be caused by the way our brains are made or formed, by neurochemical imbalances and genetics, by life stressors and even by the environments in which we were raised and the ways we are taught to think.  And we have learned that even Christians can struggle with such issues, and that such a struggle does not serve as a barometer of faith.

And yet I never feel quite so small as when I admit to this struggle, or when I feel it.

Scholars have theorized Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” had something to do with his vision.  I sometimes wonder, wish, that it was a little like what I experience with anxiety: something inexplicable like this, something devastating that on the surface seems like it ought to be little more than a matter of will.  At any rate, I take comfort that both Paul and I asked God to take our struggles away and He has not done so.

But, you know, there’s a grace hidden in here.

Experiencing anxiety is a little, at least for me, like a sudden and unexpected fall into the valley of the shadow of death.  To feel it is to experience, to brush up against, a great and perilous darkness.  To come up against that darkness is to feel how very small and fallible you are: one who can be crushed and overwhelmed very easily, in the end.  One whose competence, confidence, and attributes can dissolve away in a breath.

One way or another, we all come to the end of ourselves.

It might not be here, or like this.  You might never experience anxiety in your life.  But there will come a time—whether through some other means, through tragedy or stumble or illness, through circumstance or failure—when all of the everything you are quails, and falters, and fails.  Even when you try your best.  Even when you wish it wouldn’t.    When that happens, you will feel small, too, and powerless, and ashamed and embarrassed.  You will think, is this really who I am?  Or is this all I can do?  You will wonder why you aren’t somehow better or more.

The grace is that unchanging God loves you here as ever.  As much, as completely.

And you can’t feel that, really feel it, until you’ve fallen into that valley.  Until, whether through sin or circumstance or sorrow, you wake up and find yourself as you really are.    

I have a theory—and it is a theory only—that this kind of dissolving, this moment of realizing how very flawed and frail you are, can be a particularly shattering experience for those of us who never had a “lightning-bolt” salvation experience.  I have known believers who came to the throne of grace from rock bottom, from addiction, from hopelessness and great sorrows and great tragedies.  They started from a deep recognition of who they were.

For the rest us, that knowledge comes first intellectually and through understanding, and later through experience.  And it can be a difficult and crushing experience indeed—unless and until you feel that God loves remains constant and unchanging through it.

There’s a Christian meme that makes me laugh every time I see it.  It reads thusly: “When God made a calling on your life, He factored in your stupidity.”  I love it because it really is a shorthand for a broader truth: God knew and knows all of you, in your smallness and your frailty, and He still chose you, called you, has plans for you.  He knows very well who this version of you is.  He knows you in your totality. Always has, always will.

And He loves you anyway.  Even at the end of yourself.