Unraveling

I had my first panic attack last year. I didn’t know what was happening at first. I woke up with an intense dread of going to school. I didn’t know how I was going to manage walking down the street and going into the building and doing teacher things for seven hours. My chest was hurting and I thought maybe, possibly, I was having a heart attack, but I could still walk and move, so I put my jacket on and left the house. By the time I got to my classroom, I was crying uncontrollably and didn’t think I could make it through the day, the week, the year.

When I described how I felt to a doctor, she said, “It sounds like PTSD.” PTSD is for soldiers or prisoners of war, so I didn’t really buy it. At first. Then I started thinking about my life in a real way. The doctor said, “Grief is like when your pet dies. Trauma is like watching a mountain lion grab your pet off your front porch and crunch its neck in front of you. ” She asked me to name a time when I was traumatized. I just looked at her and said, “Just one? Because I can name three things like that just last year.”

So I had to pick a starting place….and I picked the night that I got the call about my parents’ accident. That was the night I lost my anchor. That was the night everyone started looking to me to be the anchor. And maybe if I’d been an anchor before that night, I was only strong because I had a bigger anchor holding me down.

I thought I was getting through and doing what I needed to do. Going to school was my sanctuary. I’d go to work and see my friends and laugh and mostly love the kids and celebrate in their achievements. So the panic attacks centered on being afraid to go to school were super confusing. The best I can explain was that something happened to me last year when I was on the levee and Shayne was missing. I thought he might be dead and nothing about that made sense to me. Like how do you go through the rest of your life if your kid kills himself. And then what came after was even worse. I still can’t talk about it. So even though I KNOW logically that it isn’t my fault that my son is schizophrenic, I can’t let go of my responsibility as a parent. He is mine. I chose him. After all that, I would go to school and see these little kids in all kinds of trauma and it would eat at me, trigger panic in me, and I’d think, “I’ve no business being around these kids. I’m just gonna screw them up too.” Rational? Probably not, but that’s where I was last spring.

I’ve spent months working on layers and layers of trauma. I’m no way “healed,” but I hadn’t had a panic attack or a nightmare in months. Until a few days ago. The nightmare was about one of my students. In the dream, he was on his bicycle and run over by a jeep, with the rest of my class looking on. The old agitation and fear are back and hard to push away. It makes sleep hard to come because the dreams are so vivid and real, and on and on and on. But being surrounded by kids actively living in trauma isn’t doing great things for me. I have a huge network of family and friends to love and help me and it still is super hard. I have no idea sometimes how some students in my class come to school and do anything at all. And helping them just seems so impossible.

So I have to remind myself–you write your own story, so figure out how to weave this shit in, in a way that brings hope, and love, and light.” And breathe.