I’ve talked about the constant monitoring that I believe has been a part of my brain activity for many, many years now – way more layers deep than I was conscious of.  From the physical (see the whole list here in my 321 lb Girl Part Two post) straight on through every reaction to and from me, and the emotional impact of every word out of my mouth.  And I know every word as it comes out of my mouth.  Even though I speak extemporaneously (in both personal and professional settings), I am weighing and adjusting every word.  I thought everyone did this, by the way, with the speaking.  Nelson says he doesn’t – he doesn’t think about what he’s saying as he actually says it.  I guess that means there are more out there who do the same thing?

We do all monitor – or at least most everybody, I think.  And self-monitoring is a good and healthy thing.  Here, finally, we can talk about equipoise.  Equipoise is a word/concept that my father came upon last year.  It was used in Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” with the following definition:  the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.  I leapt on this with such enthusiasm – thinking this is EXACTLY what I do!!!  This is why I walk around with a constant in-my-face opinion of myself.  In the end, it was often a positive opinion – having negotiated a relationship or conversation or rehearsal well, showed patience or chose kindness instead of criticism.  The net positive would be because I felt that in any interaction, there were plenty of places where it could go another way – the person I was talking to could have thought less of me or I could have been insensitive – and I had the presence of mind to correct that possibility on the spot.

No.  What I was doing was hypervigilance.  Let’s define that one.  Wikipedia says that hypervigilance is “an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats.”  It’s accompanied by anxiety and another definition I found says that hypervigilance is “when an anxiety sufferer is excessively aware of certain things that are anxiety-provoking to that particular sufferer.”

Well, damn if that doesn’t make more sense now I am looking back at it.  I had projected my personality as a mask to my weight and that gradually developed into uber-control of my personality.  Trying to make it flawless.  And that’s linked to my feelings of being loved because of all those personality traits (that I was in control of) – all my responses – all of my ways of being helpful.  And of course I walked away with a net positive opinion because I wouldn’t accept leaving a situation in any other state.  One way or another it would end with everybody being okay and happy.  And so, I assumed, thinking only of my wonderful role in that and therefore not anything negative about me or my body.  That’s the threat I was protecting against – my “certain thing that would have been anxiety-provoking.”

But then, as things started to fall apart last fall and all the way up to now, I lost control of many things.  I didn’t have control of my physical well-being and as the more I began to realize these emotional walls, the more they started to break down and the more vulnerable I became.  And what I’m tempted to say is that I lost control of my emotional hold on the people around me, but what I know to be true is that I never did controlthe people around me – emotionally or otherwise!  I may have been able to impact them significantly, but I never controlled them.  That’s just the read that I got from my monitors.  All clear on the emotional front!

So…now…in this place of relative stillness that comes partly from everything that I’ve been through in the last many months and largely from this forced slowness and isolation of surgery recovery…I find that I need to adjust to some new feelings that I think come from my monitors trying to change.  I will get little bursts of anxiety – how am I doing?  How is Nelson?  How are my friends?  What’s it going to be like when I jump back in?  Was it really okay to leave my lists for this long?  Is anyone sad?  Is anyone going through a rough time and I’m not there?  On and on and on…  And with the simplest tiny application of rational thought, I know that everything is okay.  I am doing well – physically and emotionally.  Nelson and I are doing well.  The path ahead is exciting – not because I’m making it exciting, because it is exciting.  My friends are living their lives and I’m in the loop.  I’m not worried about jumping back in or what’s ahead in the recovery and the new body…I’m just not to that point yet and need to wait a little longer.

Stillness needs to be a good thing in my life.  These little flashes of anxiety feel like part of the process of adjusting things down a little bit.  They’ve been so present for so long that they were constant.  The fact that they are coming in flashes now is probably a good thing.  It’s a little like trying to empty your head before being able to rest, or what I imagine would happen if I tried to meditate.  Let the flashes come up and then let them go by and eventually you’ll just be able to sit in stillness.

I would like to live with equipoise and not hypervigilance and that’s a big learning curve for my monitors.  I think they are beginning their adjustment and I just need to let them!