Garden Variety Neurotic

Mon, 07/29/2024 - 15:19

My family had a saying to explain almost every aberration they came across when it came to unusual behavior within our system. “Don’t worry about it, it’s just nerves.” Huh. Thinking back on it, every expression that seemed extreme to the occasion was brushed away with that phrase. “Just nerves” was nothing to be afraid of, it was to be expected, it didn’t matter. “You’ll get over it.” Of course you will. It’s “just nerves”. So for a kid, I took that to mean that any strong emotion did not have value, couldn’t be indulged, and should be brushed aside.

Obviously this nothing-to-worry-about malady only seemed to be evident in my family. I did not see other kids obsessing about anything. In fact, I can remember feeling like I walked around in an invisible cloud-filled telephone booth where the lines were dead. Isolated in my ‘nothing to worry about just nerves state’, I often felt immobilized, unable to respond, shut down. If I could shut down for long enough, the phone line might be magically be repaired, the cloud dissipate, and the door open to the outside world. I retreated into books, my lifeline to other realities. Even a Disney comic book with it’s bright colors and inane dialogue had the power to lift me out of myself. Where would I have been without that escape?

I put myself in therapy when I was eighteen because by then I realized that the ‘just nerves’ I suffered from were not minor, were not insignificant, and were hampering my ability to cope with taking care of my two younger brothers, cooking, and cleaning. My mother was in a psychiatric ward at that point, with her own variety of ‘just nerves’. I found the therapist in the yellow pages. He sat behind his desk -- don’t think I ever saw him stand up, now that I look back on it. My dad reluctantly paid the $15 per hour (it was 1960) for this man’s time, and his only advice, ultimately, was “when you feel anxious, put a sugar cube under your tongue.” Really. I think I went maybe five times.

Now everybody has a case of “just nerves” but they have much better terminology for it and are taken much more seriously. Anxiety attacks are horrible, and that’s what I had, and what I still have from time to time. People have varying degrees of sensitivity to outside stimulants, like noise, crowds, chaos. I apparently have very little ability to tolerate much. Triggers are everywhere. Learning this about myself has taken me a very, very, long time. Even my long-term therapist from my midlife crisis said, when pressed, that my condition was “just garden variety neurotic’. Again, ordinary, nothing to worry about.

But I have learned that my condition, whatever it is, matters. It matters to me, and I still am trying to learn how to negotiate the curves it continues to throw my way. I have a heart problem called atrial fibrillation, and that too is not ‘dangerous’ my doc tells me, but it sure as certain feels like it is. And what triggers it, insofar as I can determine, seems to be emotional, or in other words “just nerves”. I am henceforth going to take my nerves seriously. I want to honor my nerves. Join me. Let’s let our nerves know that they matter, that whatever messages they are trying to send, be it danger, toxins, overwhelm, we will receive them and they will be heard. Let’s listen to every last one of them, those persistent and altogether important, nerves.

End of rant. I hope you are having a peaceful day. Thanks for listening.