And Some Days I Hide

I have this issue with Autumn.  I love it; don’t get me wrong.  I look forward all year to the colder temperatures and the changing colors.  I love pumpkin patches and hot cocoa and Thanksgiving days.

But for me there’s a darker side to it as well.

I usually get anxious in the fall.

It used to be really bad.  I would spend a month or two obsessing about things, making myself miserable.

The past few years have not been like that.  But still I will have my days, and today is one of those days.

It might sound weird for me to say I’m hesitant to share about them.  After all, I write about pretty much everything.  But there’s something scary about saying you feel vulnerable.  To me, the word is almost scary to write out and it’s really scary to say out loud.

But that’s how I feel on days like today.  Vulnerable.

I get stress headaches on days like today.  It makes it hard to even be around light.  I just want to hide.  Everything that happens around me feels like a threat.  My mind pays attention to every little sound around me, and with four kids, a cat, a dog, and a husband, there is always a sound around me.  They feel like assaults.  I just restarted my computer, and the “blip” sound it makes as it came back on literally made me startle and jerk away.

These are the sensory stimulations that cause me problems.  But I think the problem goes deeper than that.

It more feels like a lack of safety in the world.  Like I don’t feel secure.  Like there are very real and very big threats out there that threaten to undermine me and devalue me and make me feel really awful.

I don’t know if any of that makes sense.  Does it?  Is it normal for a grown, 40 year old woman to occasionally feel so threatened by the world that the only safe place seems to be her bed?

Because that’s how I feel.  I want to hide under my covers and turn off the lights and let no one in.  I want to protect myself and guard myself.  There’s too much out there.

And this all might sound a bit extreme.  But I’m starting to learn that it’s really not.  I used to feel like this and it would spin me out of control.  I would spend weeks on end analyzing the feelings and trying to overcome them.  I tried to solve them.

Now I just accept them.  Well, as much as you can accept fear or terror.  But I try to remember that they are fleeting.  They will likely be gone tomorrow and if not, they should be by the next day.

Feelings are fleeting.

I’ve been hearing a lot about self care lately.  How it involves doing something that feeds your soul rather than something that hides from life.  But tonight I’m going to hide.  And I think that’s okay.

And perhaps it’s okay to tell the world we feel vulnerable.  Or maybe it’s not.  I’ve never done it before.  I legitimately would not be able to say the word out loud without blushing or cowering.  But I’m sharing it.  Because the only thing scarier than being out in the world some days is being alone inside of it.

God bless you all.  I’m not proofreading this one.  Grammarphiles, please forgive me.