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- Crying Wolf: Part Two
Crying Wolf: Part Two
Well, I slept for ten hours and the cough is gone. I feel fine, no temperature, nothing out of the ordinary. So I guess it was a dog. (Most likely candidate for breed of dog: hay fever.) Though in this time of mild symptoms and asymptomatic carriers, who can say for sure. It has been replaced by a far more easily-identified symptom: shame. Shame at having mentioned it at all, shame at having attracted attention and sympathy, shame for making a fuss about nothing. Living with an anxiety disorder is exhausting because you cannot trust your instincts at all. Imagine trying to drive a car but every instrument on the dashboard is faulty, but crucially, not faulty all the time. Maybe you can approximate your speed by following what the cars around you are doing, you can just about keep track of how much petrol you've got by remembering when you last filled the tank, and when those emergency lights come on, obviously you could pull over and have a look, but if it's happening every couple of minutes you can't check every time, so you have to try to deduce the likelihood that they are right, and if not, drive along with them blinking alarmingly in your face while convincing yourself that it's probably nothing and you're almost sure that your brakes won't fail. And when your brakes do fail, your last thought as you careen into a tree is to ask yourself why, when the warning light did go off, you decided to ignore it. How many times have I tried to make a difficult decision and somebody has told me to listen to my gut? My gut is a lunatic. My gut tells me that I am going to vomit several times a day when I actually haven't thrown up since I was ten. My body and my brain are in constant cahoots to tell me that something is badly wrong and I have to spend my time finding that one little part of me that knows what's really happening and trust it to make all the decisions. And that one little part of me moves around. She is my true self but she is always bloody hiding. Other parts of me dress up as her. It's tempting to always look for the most rational voice, but that very sensible, reassuring part of my mind is just possibly sitting surrounded by smoke and flames refusing to run because it doesn't want to make a big deal out of feeling hot and not being able to breathe. But I'm getting there. I take time every day to sit still and just listen to myself, and that's got me better at hearing myself at other times, when everything is in motion. From all that listening, the voice of my true self has got a little louder, a little easier to identify. I've learned that every time I find and listen to and speak from my true self, my vision gets a little clearer, my mind and my body and reality align a little closer. I've learned that sometimes I hear myself loud and clear, and it's the world around me that's telling me not to listen. I've learned that when all the alarms are going off, there is something wrong, just often not the thing that the alarms are telling me is wrong. I've learned that the alarms are trying to protect me and that I owe them love and gratitude for that. And I've learned that sometimes a dog looks a lot like a wolf, and a wolf looks a lot like a dog. Now I need to learn to forgive myself when I can't tell the difference.
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