Anxiety or Intuition

This is the companion post to Episode 3 of the podcast. If you haven't listened yet, head there first

Em asks me if I felt pressure. And I answered, always. I think so much of my life has been working to avoid contributing to assumptions of people like me, a girl raised by a single mother, a low-income student, a child of addicts, a girl who wants to do things deemed only for the boys. The pressure of performing to achieve an outcome that is unexpected is so incredibly heavy. And, where does that pressure come from, because so often the things I think people know about me, they would never assume. 

Again, I am taken aback by the ways memories act like translucent entities, dissolving and reforming throughout a lifetime, to effervesce into new life and fade again, popping back into consciousness and therefore life, before fizzling back to a silent portion of grey matter. Listening to our recollections and the massive burden fear played in that beginning time, I am reminded too of how I chose to act anyway. I think my action was partially fueled by my own desire to accomplish big things, to live a life worthy of recognition, to be the person who does things, not the person who dies having wasted this one wild and precious journey in our galaxy. But, I also think I downplay my own drive often. I hear myself retell the story of my one day 22 mile hike as though it was not an adventure in and of itself. I can acknowledge that the situation could have been dire, and rather than crumble, I used the resources I had, the knowledge I’d gained, and I managed it. 

I think of myself as an anxious person, afraid of a lot of things, unwilling to try new things that might test my boundaries, limiting myself with constraints that feel safe and appropriate. But, in this story I hear myself explaining a situation in which I not only did something wild, risky, and adventurous, but I navigated something that was frightening without falling apart. So often, our internal voices whisper things that make us doubt the words others scream to us in support. I can step back here and recognize a part of myself that I don’t think is often at the forefront of my recognition of my identity. I am resourceful and considered. I am capable and accomplished. 

I do believe my fear of this hike is a byproduct of the internal voice. I do think somewhere in my mushy synapses that my memories of something scary and uncertain planted seeds that blossomed when I was imagining another similar adventure. It’s amazing how our minds will connect things that we cannot easily see and it takes multitudes to uncover with steady intention and therapeutic reflection. Paired with that fear of getting lost, our struggles to get ourselves to the place to start only added to those anxieties. 

Not everyone believes in the mystical but too often in my life I have had moments of connection that are beyond what I can comprehend. Precognition is frequent, I’ve had dreams or feelings, thoughts most often pop into my head that are completely detached from anything relevant to the current moment and later become immediately apparent were the universe giving me a heads up. 

One of the best examples of this was before Em’s wedding. I was driving home maybe a month before her wedding date and thought, what could I make to bring to her wedding, before immediately questioning why I would think of bringing food after she had just told me a few weeks before she had found a caterer. She told me that weekend that the caterer had backed out. Simple, little things like that have always been part of my life. I just know things sometimes, and others in my hindsight the silly misplaced thought becomes connected to something that happens later. 

But, as a person who has a lot of anxiety, this is a dangerous game. How does one separate what is a feeling that will come to fruition, and what is just anxiety spinning tales to keep you awake? I think often of that stupid little meme, that anxiety is loud and intuition is quiet, because anxiety is a spiraling thought, one that will not leave, and intuition is a whisper, a little heads up from the universe. Then I think, maybe that dark moment of the eclipse, or what we could see of it, or the nightmare on night zero, were letting me know that things might get hairy. I will never know if it was truly an omen, I think I am likely the only person who gets to decide such things. I suppose the more important point is when I look back to the last time I was in a sticky situation and recognize a brave and actionable person who managed to find a solution to achieve safety, that’s the better prediction of whether the silly little happening is an omen or a coincidence.