Must I still have anxiety from 20 years ago?

Because I should be very over this by now.

Writing is how I process my thoughts, but I usually don’t publish my more personal ones. However, inspired by a friend, today I am making an exception. Here’s something different before my next series begins.

Every now and then, I’ll awake in the middle of the night in a panic. I’ve heard a sound—the crunch of a footstep beneath my bedroom window perhaps, or what sounds like my back door opening.

It’s not actually these things, and I can usually get back to sleep once I realize it. But this is not normal, my friends tell me. None of them panic that someone might break into their house in the middle of the night with the intent to harm them.

But I do, because 20 years ago someone did break into my bedroom in the middle of the night—with a knife. I woke to the sound of the screen ripping off my window, I saw him struggling to open my window, I still remember the crash of him breaking through the glass when he couldn’t. He was there to kill me, he’d left a note for his parents explaining his plan.

But I was 20 years old back then, and that was the end of a five-year period during which this person stalked, threatened, and attempted to harm me and my sister on numerous occasions. You can read the full story here if you’re interested—though I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re prone to anxiety. For the sake of this essay all you need to know is that he’s been in prison ever since. My family and I healed, we moved on and all live happy and beautiful lives. Most of the time I forget this even happened to me—I mean it’s been 20 years!

Except that sometimes in the middle of the night I still wake in fear, and that means my body still remembers something my mind has long forgotten.

And that is deeply aggravating to me.

It’s not just this one trauma, all anxiety works like this—at least for me. Claude calls it “somatic anxiety” and I’ve had it as long as I remember. It’s when nothing in your life feels wrong at all, and yet your body develops symptoms of disorder any way because it detects that something is. Over the years, it has taken many forms, aching muscles is the most common, but I also experience numbness, muscles involuntarily twitching or pinging as if with electricity, bouts of vertigo, heart palpitations and racing. You know, the kinds of things your mind latches onto and goes, “I’m developing MS” or “I’m experiencing a stroke,” or “I’m having a heart attack.”

I know the signs of my anxiety so well by now that I can reason with it. First, because I have gotten full-body scans the past two years in a row and that has given me an armful of evidence to counter with. Then, because I can recognize the tells: When symptoms only appear before I go to bed then it’s obviously my anxiety—real bodily disorders don’t typically wait until I’m at rest to creep in. Finally, and most importantly, I can look back and say (cue Hansel voice from Zoolander) “wait, haven’t you had [insert three diseases of your choice], in the past year alone, so couldn’t this all be in your head?”

It is, and because I am aware of this, I am careful to stop it immediately. The moment my body has developed some new “disease,” I start doing yoga every night before bed. My symptoms go away every time.

But as with my midnight panics, I am annoyed by this. Because I usually feel fine—not stressed or overwhelmed. I might even feel content, happy, or joyous. But the body is tuned into a finer signal that the mind can’t detect. There’s an earthquake below, and the body disturbs first. The mind can’t feel it until the seismic waves get too large, enough that it can start to worry and think, “something’s wrong,” or at its most severe, “I’m going to die.”

When I was in my early 20s and suffering panic attacks, things were really bad. Giant seismic forces throwing my body into chaos, my heart ceasing to beat for several moments at a time, my lungs gasping for air, and my mind convinced I was dying. All of it with the obvious cause: the trauma I was then enduring. Now, in my early 40s, they are extremely mild, just the smallest of bodily sensations. Armed with reason and my yoga mat, I note those tremors in my field notes for what they are: my body responding to a disturbance my mind can’t detect yet. Usually something minor like I have too much on my plate, I had an upsetting interaction with a family member that’s still bothering me, or I have a parole hearing to attend.

Funny how the body can keep track of these things even when the mind thinks it’s moved on.

The parole hearings are a newer thing. They’ve occurred once or twice a year for the past four or five. We hear his voice on the phone, explaining why he tried to kill us that night and many times before, we hear him reason why he won’t do it again when he’s out, and then we speak. My statement is a Google Doc I’ve filled with facts. I’ve never trusted my emotions with this doc and wrote it with all the rigor of a journalist. I pulled out all the transcripts from past sentencing hearings and trials and police reports so I could quote what was said verbatim rather than rely on my memory, and I’ve recorded every hearing since so I can refer back to those transcripts too.

Every year, I mark the event on my calendar as if it were any other meeting invite, and every year I think it’s not going to disrupt my day at all. Like I’ll go to work, attend this meeting, and then go back to work again. After all, it’s only about 30 minutes—all I have to do is show up and read something I wrote. But when I read my statement I hear a wobble in my voice. And afterwards, when I expect to get back to my workday with ease, I can’t. I’m gutted. Most recently, I was so exhausted I ate cereal for lunch, fell into my couch, and watched every episode of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, my eyes watering tears for no apparent reason at all. Except for the obvious reason that I attended a parole hearing that day and was probably upset about it. The next morning I woke up in pain, every muscle firing aches against my will.

My husband and family find this obvious. Of course I was upset by having to speak at the parole hearing, they think. But I’m annoyed by it. Why should this still affect me years later? Why should I be left with the remnants still? I am a 41-year-old well-adjusted person who knows an awful lot about healing, who spent years on my mental health back then and who still prides myself on how well I’m able to care for myself with vigilant maintenance. I mean, look how good I am at NOT having anxiety most of the time!?? Look how happy and content and at peace I am in my life!!!!!

And yet, I can feel the rumbles still. I must remain vigilant with my field notes, noting the signs so that I don’t accidentally let things get worse.

Because if I let things get too far, then we reach the darker edge. Because how does one know when it’s not just the tremors of anxiety but the real thing: An actual medical emergency requiring the ER, or an actual person breaking into my house and trying to kill me? My body acts up because it’s trying to get my attention, it wants to alert me to a problem. And 99.9% of the time that problem is normal general stressors of being alive. But 0.1% of the time it’s really a man trying to get into my bedroom in the middle of the night and my body needs to react fast enough to run away.

That means my body sometimes runs in panic mode on the back end. Alert, aware, ready to notify me of danger even if there is no longer any danger to be found.

My solution is always the same: Calm the backend alert system. Yoga, yoga, yoga. Stretch my body, listen to relaxing music while I do it, have a journal ready so I can jot down the thoughts in my mind and know what it’s doing, then focus my mind on a more beautiful narrative instead. More stretching, deep breaths. Savasana. This, paired with the reasonable fail-safes—annual medical screenings, secured doors and windows—arms me with calm and reason. If it’s the usual stressors, this helps me resolve them, and everything goes away. If it’s ever the tiny minority when something is more serious, then I will be calm in the face of it.

We are alive, and so our bodies will always worry about survival. But unlike every other species, we also have minds capable of worrying about so much more than that—navigating social and familial life, having bosses and jobs and stress. And no matter the disturbance to our mind, our bodies will read the signals as a threat to survival. Even if it’s as small as a stressful workday or a lingering trauma from 20 years ago.

So, despite my annoyance, I keep vigilant with my field notes. Most of the time, I feel good and happy and well. And when my body doesn’t—when my head decides to split into massive headaches or my arms go weak or I wake in a panic from a noise outside—I know it’s a sign from my body to come back to the mat. To read happy books and watch happy sitcoms. To eat comfort foods. To point my mind toward beautiful things. To throw everything I have at my peace and happiness and repeat the process forever and ever.

Because I am alive and that means I have a mind and a body—and I have to care for both if I don’t want to spend that life in fear or anxiety. But I’m annoyed about that too. And I’m frustrated that our bodies require so much maintenance to feel good. And I’m exhausted that the body keeps remembering things I want it to forget. I know this is part of just having a nervous system that must be constantly regulated in the face of thousands of stimuli, and I’m aware that being mad about it is akin to being annoyed by having to eat three times a day or maintain my muscle strength—but frankly sometimes I’m annoyed about those things too.

And I’m writing this post in the middle of that annoyance, I suppose, to let out the frustration I’m feeling and to remind myself that it’s ok, after this most recent hearing, to have to come back to my mat once again, all so that I can be back to the beauty of it all by tomorrow.

Press repeat.

I don’t usually publish posts like this—please be respectful in the comments.

As always, thank you for reading!

Elle Griffin