This last week, I had an adventure up to Skyward Corporate Headquarters, up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. With stops and traffic, this drive from Blormal I tend to average at five hours, meaning that there is plenty of time to think and otherwise make a lot of headway on a good audiobook.
I do enjoy going up to Headquarters. There are some amusing doubletakes, and I appreciate seeing people in their context, where everyone is more than their name and a picture in the upper corner of the email or a voice on the phone. I work with real people outside of my own small office. The training that I was up there for seemed to go really well, in my estimation of things, and I have some good things to keep thinking about. However, the part that I want to share today was the drive home.
After about an hour and a half into the trip, I realized that my hands were aching, which in turn led to the realization that I was gripping the steering wheel as though it were anchoring my body to my chair, white knuckles and tensed arms. I also realized that I wasn't breathing, either holding my breath or taking only tiny breaths. These tiny breaths are designed to not disturb my abdominal cavity.
A further body scan revealed that I was tensing my legs and lower abdominals, bracing myself for any bump or, in general, against pain. I took a moment to try to consciously relax these parts of my body, but more importantly I asked myself, gently, what was going on. I was geared up for survival, for protection. I mean, the construction wasn't that bad, the weather was clear, and no one was driving with any more assholery than normal.
It clicked a few miles later: this was the Mayos drive. My mind wasn't thinking about it at all, but my body knew this drive. My body knew this path. Three quarters of the drive to Stevens Point is two thirds of the drive to Rochester, Minnesota, where I have gone many times to the Mayo Clinic.
The drive up there, heading straight up 39, I've had some good associations with that first part of the trip, having pulled off toward Chicagoland for all kinds of adventures and memories with friends and family. However, once 39 joins up with 90 and even later joining with 94, that leg loses that buffer. The way home, once I was on 39/90/94 and then eventually 39 all the way home, has no buffer at all--it's there and raw and jarring. Or so my body was telling me.
I have made that trip with grief, with resignation, with anger, with hopelessness, with desperation, with anxiety, with fear, and otherwise in a great deal of pain. My mind was elsewhere, but my body remembered that drive and it knew that place.
Sorting out those thoughts, I had three particular impulses that my body wanted to do to discharge those feelings: cry, curl protectively around myself, and escape. As the only occupant in the car at the moment, I settled on putting my foot down a little more firmly on the accelerator, the best escape I could manage at the moment. I still had to pull off to recognize other bodily needs, but I was pretty sure that if I allowed myself a good, long cry or just to curl up into a ball, that I was not going to pull out of it to be home in time for our evening plans, nor would I feel "safe" until I was long enough off of this path.
That drive does a number on me every time. And I forget it each time until I tune in to what my body is telling me. My emotions have a physical toll on my body. The physical toll on my body has similarly built many lingering emotions. It's all connected, the extreme symptoms of both the body and the mind, expressing through each other. I think this happens sometimes because we haven't allowed a clear path--intentionally or otherwise--and other times its just the way your body and mind need to experience that stimuli, whether it's grief, pain, or any other overwhelming something.
I did have a good, long cry when I got home that night. Andy was kind enough to just let me pour out all of the swirling pieces, offering reassurance where I asked for it and otherwise just being that compassionate presence. I am still growing in this awareness of self, particularly in the physical components, pausing to ask myself where and how I am feeling an emotion in my body as it is happening. This process is gradually refining through practice to where I work to give descriptions of what is happening in my body, which serves as its own resource.
For example, I have recently felt a surge of inadequacy that for me felt like a weight in the undersides of my forearms and upperarms, continuing into an ache in the bottom of my ventral abdomen. Depending on the source of a particular grief I might be feeling, I might feel it with a different sensation in a different part of my body--there's a difference in when it rests as a choking weight on my throat and chest as opposed to an impossibly solid wall right behind my eyes or directly in the center of my torso as a radiating dark mass. It's all grief, but sometimes I need to feel it differently with how that particular grief wave has rolled through.
This timing was oddly appropriate, given that I was up at corporate for emotional intelligence training and more importantly I am now two years with my permanent colostomy. I don't know what to do with this anniversary. When a loved one dies, socially past the first year I don't feel that it's widely acceptable to mark the day publicly anymore (not necessarily frowned on, but definitely not openly encouraged). But the grief waves still roll through; that change in your life resonates with you even when it feels everyone else has forgotten. My ostomy surgery was a good thing. It was also something to grieve about. I'm developing ways that I want to choose to mark it, but my running favorite right now is to choose to make a new change to benefit my body--this November, I'm working on getting back onto keto in earnest, and I am getting back into the pool again. Lap swimming has a bonus of stretching me cognitively, as I watch my body in suspended space, scanning for those sensations and what I'm feeling in those moments as muscle memory slowly reawakens.
It's practice, learning how to be with your emotions and your body. It's understanding that helps you connect them. It's a wholistic "you" that can grow out of it. Listening to your body is hard, particularly when it is telling you news that you don't want to hear, but it is an invaluable resource, cluing you in to pieces long before your brain can catch up.
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