Over the past year or so, I’ve been going through a really difficult situation. At various points, I was convinced that I would not survive it, at least not with my life as I knew it in tact. It sounds dramatic because it was. And if I’m honest with you, sometimes it still is.
I’m not going to share the details of the situation, which is about the most annoying way that a writer can start an essay. I personally can’t stand it when someone does this. But here we are. If you are the Give me the juicy mess or give me nothing! type (like I am), I respect if you stop here. For those open to hanging in, we will hereafter call this situation The Shitshow.
In one particularly shitty moment of The Shitshow, I received a letter from a person who felt important and authoritative and, frankly, scary. The person, who has never met me, said some really mean and attacking things. Their words went right for the jugular, maligning my competency and my character. It was like they had read my fourth grade diary to figure out how to inflict the greatest pain.
Except, of course, they hadn’t read my diary. Because almost anyone would have felt hurt by these words. And they hurt me in the particular ways they did because the places they touched were unhealed. Someone lobbing a ball at you can hurt, but the excruciating pain only comes when there’s an open wound or a deep bruise there. The Shitshow and the letter were a salty ball to my tender wound.
I read the letter in my car, and as I finished I sat in a state of total nervous system shut-down. I was frozen in fear, my brain glitching on how to even turn the car back on. I wasn’t sure whether to yell or cry or drive to Dairy Queen. I felt about ten years old at that moment, triggered to a place of terrified self-doubt and, I hate to admit, self-loathing.
And then I heard a little voice from the back of the car, a familiar high-pitched, “Mom!” whiplashing me back to the parking lot. “We’ve been here for-eva!” she moaned. “We need to get my ballet dress!”
Suddenly I remembered that we had been headed to pick up the last few pieces of her uniform. I snapped back mostly into mom mode, no longer fully ten years old, though that part of me was certainly still activated and needed me to come back to help her. But for now we needed a leotard.
–
I spent the next few days in somewhat of a triggered haze. I was going through the motions and getting what I needed accomplished, but I was gripped by anxiety and shame and sadness. My routine helped me be in other parts of myself – mom, of course, as well as boss and partner and community member – but each of those felt like clothes I was putting on, roles I was stepping into but not able to embody. I still felt overwhelmed and fragmented.
That week I even co-facilitated a big workshop with a friend, which went well and was met with lots of great feedback. But when you are caught in the grips of activation, even kindness or evidence to the contrary of what you fear can have little weight. It was like water rushing over me but somehow I stayed dry.
After the workshop, my friend and I decided to take the rare opportunity to get lunch together. We talked for a while and I eventually filled her in on The Shitshow. She narrowed her eyes in empathy as I talked, and she said she was so sorry for how difficult it had all been. She reminded me that I would get through this season and that she had my back. And then she said, “Now it’s time that you remember who the fuck you are.”
I think I let out a laugh when she said it, and so she said it again. “No, I’m serious,” she deadpanned. She leaned forward this time, locking my eyes. “You remember who you are.”
–
After a few errands, I made it home that day and went down into the basement storage and pulled out a small plastic container, slightly bigger than a shoebox. It was stuffed full of photos of me, curated by my parents at some distant point in history and miraculously having traveled with me over the countless homes I’d occupied. I actually couldn’t remember having ever gone through it before. The thick layer of dust on the lid seemed to confirm that.
I sat down on my bed and lifted the lid. I pulled out thick stacks of photos and started sifting through them. In one, I sat perched in a highchair, red sauce staining my round cheeks and creeping into my dark curls. In another, I laid sprawled out in a mint green swimsuit on a towel in our front yard, sunbathing while listening to a walkman. In the next, I was sitting surrounded by cousins at a picnic table, ready to blow out the seven candles on the elaborately frosted cake in front of me.
The photos spanned from babyhood to a few years beyond college and they were in loose heaps with no evidence of a chronology. It was as if someone took a life, tore it into pieces of confetti, and shook them all up. They now lay scattered across my bed.
But while the timeline was scattered, there was a story here – so many interweaving stories. I could see this girl licking her lips to taste every last bit of sweetness from the icing. And then a few years later, I could see the way she was trying to suck in her belly with her arms crossed tightly around her. I could see her splashing in her cousin’s pool, so unaware that there was anything beyond that very afternoon. I could see her standing next to the boy in the circular framed glasses before the sophomore dance, glaring at her mom to hurry up and take the picture before she literally died. And then I could see her swaddled up in a tight ball, sleeping peacefully on her grandmother’s shoulder.
This girl had never been one thing, I noticed. There was a core essence, a self that shone through and at various points – particularly in adolescence – seemed shrouded in awkwardness or insecurity. But when I could see it, it was clear that the essence was expansive. This girl was serious and silly. She was curious and anxious and voracious. She was kind and impatient. She was, in a word, wholly human.
It was, I noticed, impossible to look at her and to believe about her any of the awful things that I’d been saying about myself in the previous days. She could never deserve that. And by extension, neither could I.
As I lay in bed later that night, I thought about my encounter with my younger selves that afternoon. Sifting through the old photos had generated some compassion for myself, for sure, but I realized that it wasn’t only being able to be kinder to a toddler version of me that had had such a profound effect. It was, I realized, a form of widening my own lens.
The photos had helped paint a portrait of me as a person across time and space. I was multifaceted, supremely flawed, and also deeply worthy. But most importantly, I had existed long before The Shitshow had started. Long before someone wrote me a mean letter trying to tell me who I was. I wondered if I could even start to believe that she would exist long after all of this as well.
–
When crises happen – heck, when everyday stress happens – our psychological lenses narrow. For good reason, our attention zooms way in on the thing that’s going wrong. This makes total survival sense, of course. Our brains are wired to pay attention to threat first and foremost, in order to keep us alive. The good stuff fades into the periphery until we know that we are safe again.
Fascinatingly, this happens not just in some abstract internal way, but very literally plays out in the body’s visual system. When you see something visually that’s stressful – for example, your toddler about to spill your hot coffee or a social media post about escalating grocery prices, your pupils begin to dilate and your field of vision actually narrows. You see the stressful thing in sharp focus while the rest of the world literally gets blurrier. Your eyes automatically rotate their location to focus in. This is evolutionary biology at its finest and most powerful, ensuring our full attention is on the stressor.
As you can imagine, this mechanism is super helpful when the threats we were avoiding were in the form of lions or other predators. Being able to see them clearly was vital, and that pretty hummingbird in the distance was irrelevant at best and distracting at worst. But in a world where this same response can come from a nasty email, we have to be aware of how literally narrowed our view can get. This is especially true because there is a circular relationship involved. Not only does our emotional state – stress – narrow our vision, but narrow vision can itself create stress and anxiety.
Beyond being just a human curiosity, this actually does all translate into something incredibly useful for us. What’s been shown is that when you look out at the horizon – essentially looking into the distance and widening your scope – you trigger a mechanism in your brain stem that reduces vigilance and activation. This type of looking out and with a soft gaze is called panoramic vision or optic flow, and it actually turns down our body’s stress response. It’s perhaps our most literal way of widening the lens.
–
As I continued to reckon with The Shitshow, I started to look for other ways to consciously widen my own lens. Since there was little I could do to change the situation itself, my best and perhaps only bet was to figure out how to stop suffering because of it.
It wasn’t going to be about denying the reality of how hard it all was or being naive to what was happening. As I heard the brilliant On Being creator, Krista Tippett, say on a podcast recently, “Hope is kind of opening your eyes to what else is true and also just saying, ‘I won’t live in a world in which those are the only data points.’” By that definition, maybe widening my lens could give me hope. Maybe I could live in a world where this thing was true, but there were also plenty of other data points that I could pull into clearer focus.
I recognized two other modes of widening my own lens. The first was, perhaps unsurprisingly, spending more time outside. Consciously being outdoors meant, of course, more opportunity for that panoramic vision, and it helped me somatically experience some perspective. Rather than my problem filling up the entirety of my bedroom, outside that same size problem was suddenly dwarfed.
Yes, people have been saying to get outdoors to connect with nature and manage stress for a very long time. Frankly, I didn’t listen to them. It took me feeling claustrophobic from the enclosure of my own fear to do it. But once I did, I realized why it works so well: it’s harder to stay so narrowed in your distress when the world’s vastness calls for a wider gaze.
The other tool I used to widen my lens was to get curious about how my reaction to this current situation reflected a larger or older pattern of feeling in me. This is a somewhat different version of widening the lens, but a powerful one. I started asking myself to investigate the feelings I was having in the situation and notice which of them felt familiar. The familiar ones – for example, feeling guilty for someone else’s emotional distress or feeling so fearful of being seen as bad – I started to trace back to earlier experiences of feeling this way. I kept tracing until I couldn’t trace anymore, and I was back to very early times in my life when I felt that way.
This kind of emotional tracing helps widen the lens because it becomes clearer in the process that as bad as the current feeling is, it’s not the first time – or, sadly, the last time – I’ve felt it. In some cases, the process helps highlight the places where those emotional responses were initially built. With this lens widened, I’m recognizing that my reactions make a lot of sense given my history and that I have some work to do to not keep reliving them.
–
I’m delighted to tell you that I’m in a much better place than I was when all of this started. What feels most hopeful about that statement is that I can say it despite The Shitshow not actually being over. I hope it will be soon, but I don’t know. Regardless though, I’ve realized I’m going to be okay.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure that there may be more moments of hiding under the covers in future. But right now, my lens is wide enough to see that there are about a million good things in my life. They don’t have to negate or even outweigh the hard ones. They just need to be in my field of vision as well.
And too, it’s wide enough to see that I can be both imperfect and worthy at the same time. I’m covered in red sauce and standing next to an awkward boy and a woman trying to do her best. I am multifaceted and messy and I am remembering, as my friend has urged me, who the fuck I am. My lens is wide enough for it all.
