I’ve been feeling on edge lately, which is not abnormal for this time of year. Since I’ve spent a good deal of my life in school, June was usually the time of year where my normal schedule was interrupted; it was when many of my friends were packing up to move elsewhere or off having adventures somewhere. Since the summer after my freshman year of college, though, the experience of June has had added emotional weight for me. This is what that summer looked like:
June 4, 2009- The day I became covered in hives after studying for finals, ostensibly for no reason; likely a combination of untreated seasonal allergies, stress, and anxiety.
June 15, 2009- The last time I ate peanuts, which led to an allergic reaction and an existential realization about mortality (I was at a wake, which didn’t help).
June 22, 2009- The day I couldn’t fall asleep and then had my first major panic attack as the sun rose. I thought I was going to die. My parents thought I was going into diabetic shock. I went to the doctor and they told me something was weird with my thyroid. It wasn’t any of those things.
July 1, 2009- The day I (probably) had a panic attack in the middle of an allergy test and, despite having minimal allergic reaction symptoms (just hives localized to the site of the test), and no symptoms of anaphylaxis, was given a shot of epinephrine. All I wanted was to stop shaking, but epinephrine has the exact opposite effect. I felt like I was jumping out of my skin, and like I could go run a marathon. I had no idea what was happening to me. After that I went home and sat around for four hours, alternating between napping (from the Benadryl they told me to keep taking) and watching Gilmore Girls in an attempt to turn off the part of my brain that was trying to convince me I was about to die.
one year later, but around the same time and with similar results:
July 2-3, 2010- WhenI went to the emergency room twice in two days because my anxiety kept making me feel like I couldn’t breathe, as did the medicine prescribed to me for bronchitis I didn’t have.
‘Trauma Anniversary’ is a term used in counseling psychology that describes the phenomenon of increased anxiety, depression, irritability, paranoia, or sadness when the date of a past traumatic event approaches. Some people also experience more vivid memories of the traumatic experience around that time. It doesn’t need to be the exact date for these feelings to occur; just the season or setting can be enough to elicit a response.
It has always felt silly or trite to refer to my early experiences with anxiety and allergies as trauma. Millions of people in the world experience abuse and violence; war, natural disasters and terror attacks wreak havoc on otherwise normal lives. Calling what happened to me ‘trauma’ has always felt like an overreaction in comparison to these horrific actions I have had the privilege never to experience. No one hurt me. My body’s chemicals just started to be mixed together in the wrong way. How can that be the same?
And yet, every summer around this time I look down the list of symptoms, like this one from the VA, and find myself mentally checking most of the boxes: Can’t sleep. Irritability. Stress. Increased anxiety. Panic attacks. Avoidance of places and activities that are reminders of the event (replace ‘place’ with ‘food’, in my case). Feelings of itchiness for no reason; sometimes hives. It can’t be a coincidence. My body remembers what happened around this time, now eight years ago, and it’s trying to protect me somehow. It doesn’t matter where my experience falls on a comparative scale of ‘kind of a bummer’ to ‘devastating’; the fact that I continue to experience a physical response when I am reminded of needles, blood, breathlessness, and hives is what makes me reluctantly accept this term, ‘trauma’.
Self care is paramount in June– and I don’t mean coloring books or bubble baths (though those are nice, too). In times like this I have to work out how to remind myself to eat, sleep, shower, take my normal medication, see friends, and go to work. I have to try to find an outlet for the extra feelings that isn’t going to hurt me more or set me back- this year it’s been sewing basically whenever I’m in my house (my boyfriend gets a big shout-out for being cool about this). I’m an adult- I can’t stop doing the things that allow me to live an independent life, but I also can’t always do a whole lot while my brain is making me physically revisit shitty things that happened when I was 19. Sometimes self care is just doing what you need to do to continue moving forward when you’d rather be standing still.
Today after getting through work with only a few distracted periods of inactivity, I took a nap and then a shower. I washed some dishes, picked up stray socks, and made a meal that included both protein and vegetables. After this mundane kind of evening, I feel rebellious and brave for going against all the impulses my confused brain wants me to follow. It has been eight years of slow and painful progress, sometimes in the wrong direction, but I feel optimistic that someday I will note the anniversary of a highly unpleasant month with little more than a nod.
weary traveler 