Dumpsters and Recycling Bins

August has been a wild month. At one point I found myself slowly & carefully digging through four huge recycle bins and one dumpster for a car key that was accidentally thrown out with the trash…it was found, but I just wanted to burn my clothes, hands, hair…all the things…after that experience. (And no…there wasn’t a second key.). The highlight of that experience was that I managed to regulate my emotions and just deal with what was in front of me. No blaming or frustration…I just shrugged and thought, “Shit happens. I guess we are rifling through trash. I’m going to have to go slow, not make myself worse, pause and check in often with my body….AND I’m cancelling my plans and planning a second shower and major rest after this.”

Who is this person and when did they learn to be so chill?!? Not a single profanity was uttered. I guess all the meditation, counselling, journaling and creativity is finally winning the war with my brain and autonomic nervous system (ANS).

A big part of having Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is that my ANS is ridiculously over reactive. Your ANS is the part of your nervous system that controls “unconscious, involuntary bodily functions (heart rate, breathing, digestion, etc) and includes your fight-or flight (sympathetic nervous system) and the rest-and-digest (parasympathetic nervous system) response.

This dysfunctional response of my ANS is called Dysautonomia. So if let’s say I experience a stressor, my fight-or-flight as well as rest-and-digest responses are beyond wonky and ridiculous. We won’t even talk about the challenge of standing and having my heart rate obnoxiously climb into the stratosphere…making me light headed and immediately race my body to lie down before my malfunctioning brain commandeers my body and makes me pass out to fix its concerns about me standing (joy of joys). So you can imagine, if my body thinks “standing” is a stressor, how something like letting myself get “unreasonably angry” can convince my ANS to just burn everything down. I hope this helps you get how big an achievement it was not to lose my ever loving mind over the key incident. So here is a happy chaotic doodle to mark this achievement.