The Devil I Know

Maybe you have had days like this.  Days when you open your eyes after a long and involuntarily restless night and are immediately confused because you cannot seem to recall how or when you finally fell asleep.  When the earsplitting sound of your alarm rips you from whatever sleep you had managed to find.  You instinctively reach your arm out to make the startling noise of the persistent alarm stop only to realize that you cannot because your arm feels heavy and numb.  During your unpeaceful slumber you must have unwittingly slept on it, therefore, grabbing the phone to stop the unsettling noise proves to be a challenge unto itself.  When you finally shake off the pins and needles and are able to get a grip on your phone to register the time, the numbers are blurry and out of focus.  You bring the phone close to your face and squint your eyes because the time it is displaying must be a mistake.  In a state of denial and disbelief and as you lay your head back down onto the pillow, you begin to rationalize that, yes, it must be a mistake or a trick that is being played on you because how could it already be time to wake up when you are not entirely convinced that you slept?   And yet whether it is an unamusing trick, a sobering mistake or otherwise, like it or not it would seem that it is time to get up and seize the day.  At least your version of seizing a day after an emotionally-charged night that was consumed with anxiety and sleep deprivation.  Optimists would probably call every new day an opportunity. Those bewildering and unrelatable people who allegedly have a healthy relationship with the normal nightly ritual of sleeping.  The same people who claim to wake up with a power that is of their own free will and sans the relentless urging of a bossy alarm clock.  But you have never considered yourself to be an optimist.   On this particular day, that resembles many others, you are torn between a groggy acknowledgement of the time, in which case you must get up, or if you are up for a quick game of Chance.  The risky game that you often find yourself playing after you have been abruptly awakened, impulsively deactivate the phone’s pre-set ‘snooze’ feature, and with little-to-no concern for the self-imposed consequences that are sure to follow, you turn off the alarm clock entirely.  Then, to raise the stakes of this fate-tempting game even higher, you shut your eyes for just a few extra minutes to ‘rest’ only to frantically re-open them to the predictable outcome of this game which is that you have been ‘resting’ for at least another hour.  Game over.  However, while you are still horizontal and drifting somewhere between foggy slumber and lucidity, you realize that it is at this exact moment when the day starts to unravel. 

It is never a good sign that before your feet have even been given the opportunity to touch the floor, you have already started these onerous and time-thieving negotiations that are designed explicitly for the purpose of delaying the inevitable.   You are bothered that you do not know exactly how or when you finally found sleep, assuming you slept at all.  While that might seem exceptionally trivial to the restful sleepers among us, for those who struggle with nighttime sleeplessness that can often be accompanied by a debilitating panic attack, it is a critically important detail.  You are consciously irritable because although you don’t like it and find it crushingly unfair, you know that you must begin the task of getting yourself up.  An all-too-familiar and tedious morning routine that can only be accomplished by taking one little baby step at a time.  Step 1:  Rollover onto your back.  Step 2:  Sit up. Your head, at this pivotal point, should be forced to separate from the pillow. Step 3:  Carefully remove the gift of sand that the Sandman customarily leaves in the corners of your eyes while you are sleeping.  On occasion you note that there is no sand – it is a known fact that Mr. Sandman only visits those who are sleeping which can mean only one of two things:  either your initial assessment was right and you didn’t sleep at all last night or Mr. Sandman has forsaken you.  Step 4:  Remove blanket from legs and feet – everyone knows that warmth and comfort travel from the bottom to the top, not the other way around.  Step 5:   Slowly swing now-cold legs off of the bed and let them hang there for an undetermined period of time.  Step 6:  Stand up.  Step 7:  Take a small step forward not allowing the backs of your knees to have any further contact whatsoever with your bed.  It turns out that your bed is both a problem and a solution which depends on the time of day and your state of mind.  In the morning, it is a problem and will silently beckon you to get back in, therefore, the further you get away from it, the better.  You must make a choice and standing in that spot close to your bed all day is not one of them.  Therefore, you immediately start walking away from your bed and begin the short journey to the bathroom.  Your first stop is the mirror.  You cannot help but stare at the reflection of the stranger who is exhaustedly looking back at you.  Under your eyes is the accessory that you received during the overnight hours.  The undisguised dark circles that you must now wear as an inglorious badge throughout the day. A visibly cruel reminder, as if you weren’t already aware, that you are tired.

cause and effect. 

To be clear, you fully understand the nightly assignment which is fairly straightforward and unambiguous at this point in your life.  It is the time that is carved out of the allotted 24-hours of each day that is meant to be spent sleeping and recharging your battery.  An inability to sleep represents the residual effects of the day that is letting you know, in no uncertain terms, that it is not done with you just yet.  But what is less clear is the cause and exactly what it is that happened.  If it’s true that some days are worse than others, then it stands to reason that nighttime will draw its inspiration from our daytime experiences and no day looks exactly like the ones that preceded it.   What was it this time that caused the disruption to your sleep and riddled your dreams with the fears that you had managed to stave off during normal waking hours?  Fears and deeply-seated anxieties that you have conditioned yourself to hide away only for them to unceremoniously resurface anyway to claim your undivided attention when the sun goes down and the moon steps in as its nighttime placeholder.  For it is, of course, at this time when you no longer have the strength to hold up the heavy and impenetrable walls that you have carefully built.  It is when you are tired, in a mentally and emotionally weakened condition and at your most vulnerable, that your mind and your imagination become free to wander.  You resign yourself to the harsh reality that this is going to be a very long night. From the outside, you would appear to be someone who is just trying to get a good night’s sleep. On the inside, however, you are struggling to sort through the memories of your day, calm the voices in your head that are now vying for your attention and locate the proverbial needle in the haystack, also commonly referred to as ‘the cause.’  A troubled mind that is hard at work and now in overdrive when it is really in desperate need of rest.  But the day’s memories are erratic and not well-organized.  Every moment appears to be somehow magnified and garishly overstated when it is recycled through the large lens of our memories.   Like untrained detectives, we search for clues within the memories that will, fingers crossed, bring this night to an early conclusion that hopefully includes sleep in one form or the other.  Clues that could include something that happened ten minutes, ten hours, ten days or ten months before you found your bed on this night or it could even be the post trauma and residual aftereffects of something that happened a full decade ago because as it turns out, at night and in the darkness, nothing is off the table and everything is fair game.  The truth is there are too many memories that have compounded over time, therefore, trying to sift through and peel each of the layers away to get to the root cause is a nearly impossible and overwhelming task.  You know what happens next.  In the darkness and with your senses now fully heightened, the familiar slow burning sensation in your chest and precipitous increase of your heartbeat is the only warning you will get.  You are about to go on a very bumpy and involuntary ride that your subconscious mind wants to take you on.  Rather than having visions of sugar plums dancing in your head or counting a large herd of fluffy white sheep, whose woolen hair, incidentally, you are allergic to, you are instead desperately trying to put out a blazing fire. A panic attack that does not require your prior consent or permission. 

The fire.

You do not need to be an expert camper to know how to start a fire.  Imagine for a moment the kindling.  A few tiny sticks or twigs that you collect and place in a small pile.  Without really knowing how big the fire will become, and quite literally throwing caution to the wind, you slowly rub two of the small sticks together creating friction.  You know that with enough determination, sooner or later, you will eventually produce a small, but purposeful, spark.  And that little spark is really all you need, but you must be careful what you wish for.  That intentional little spark that you worked tirelessly to create will subsequently become a flame.  Then, before you know it and with help provided courtesy of the wind, the flame will reach out and touch every twig and stick in the small pile that was collected.  As time goes by, the small twigs and sticks are replaced with large logs that are meant to keep the fire going until it is burning everything around it quickly becoming an uncontainable wildfire.  That is what a panic attack feels like only the burning blaze is happening inside your chest.  At the onset of the attack, you are convinced that you are having a heart attack and dying.  While your chest tightens and contracts, your heart feels as if it is spinning around in circles at a dangerously warped speed.  You cannot seem to catch your breath or control the racing of your heart.  Your first instinct is to call for help, but other than the loud voices inside your head, the house is silent and still.  Considering the fact that this is probably not your first panic attack or visit from a demonic nighttime visitor who is hellbent on ensuring that you remain awake, you hunker down, clench your fist to your chest and you let it swallow you whole.   On this night, the demon wins.  With your troubled mind now mentally and emotionally frayed and with peaceful slumber nothing more than pipe dream, you relinquish your much-needed sleep to the devilishly cunning demon who is distorting and twisting your memories until you are no longer sure what is real and what is not.  As you try to slow your heart’s pace, you decide that the only way to separate fact from fiction at this ungodly hour, is to just try to work your way through each moment of the previous days until you have identified the cause; the reason why your peace and tranquility has been exchanged for a blazing fire inside your chest.  Again.

The devil you know.

But it turns out that replaying the previous day, and the ones that preceded it, in the middle of the night when you are tired and already in the throes of a panic attack is a fool’s errand and an exercise in futility.   This exercise that is meant to reveal the cause of unrest does not always bear fruit, in fact, oftentimes it is the opposite that happens.  Sometimes the best you can do is endeavor to mitigate its blunt impact and control the damage.  Suppressed daily stressors and anxieties can remain dormant for only so long.  Sooner or later, they will show up unexpectedly to reclaim your attention with some kind of life lesson in hand that you probably ignored the first time or simply weren’t ready to receive.  Prolific poet Charles Bukowski is quoted as having said, “Don’t fight your demons.  Your demons are here to teach you lessons.”  Maybe, but a lesson at 2:00 in the morning seems a bit harsh even by demon standards.  At the end of the day, panic attacks are your body and subconscious mind coming together, albeit when it is least convenient and in fiercely dramatic fashion, to force you to confront something that you would otherwise prefer to forget.  Regardless of whether it is a lesson or not, it feels like the work of the devil, only this is the devil you know.  It is you putting yourself through this painstakingly next-level poetic injustice.   A self-inflicted and tenuous vicious cycle that we knowingly subject ourselves to when we allow problems to remain unresolved, give open wounds time to fester rather than heal and when our body’s coping system that is built on reasoning and rational thinking by day reaches capacity and malfunctions at night.   You are your own worst enemy, therefore, in order to make peace with your deeply-rooted fears, daily stress and anxiety, and yes, even scary panic attacks, you must first make peace with yourself. 

Disclaimer and personal note from Rebellious Mama: 

Disclaimer first:  Charles Bukowski quote was found on https://quotefancy.com/charles-bukowski-quotes and is referenced exclusively for the purpose of illustrating a point. 

A personal note from RM:  As a writer with no formal training who spends a lot of time working on improving her craft, it has become clear to me that to write convincingly, you must write about what you know and from personal experience.  To that end, as a sufferer of anxiety, a self-described ‘worrywart,’ and survivor of some breathtaking panic attacks, the narratives and representations provided are mine and mine alone.  Anxiety is a devil who I know very well.  But it looks different for everyone.  Nothing here is meant to replace or substitute medical advice and/or intervention.  Anxiety is no joke and panic attacks can be incredibly isolating and scary.  For whatever reason and as illustrated above, my panic attacks visit me at night.  In fact, I cannot recall ever experiencing one during normal daylight hours.  I’m not sure if that is weird or normal and frankly, it’s probably best that I don’t know.  I sort of fly by the seat of my pants and hope for the best, therefore, it would be disingenuous of me to try to offer advice on something that I have not yet figured out myself.  The only thing I will offer that helps me is to remember to breathe and there is a great power in distraction.  Write it down, draw it, whatever you need to do to validate your feelings – do that.  Close your eyes and count backwards from a thousand and before you know it, you will be fast asleep or you won’t and will instead soon be having a battle of wits with a relentlessly bossy alarm clock.