Losing my balance
Long before I started to do an ataxic jig every night and needed help up the stairs before bed, I started losing my balance in other ways.
A couple months ago, I started seeing a new therapist.
I believe in seeking out therapy whenever I face something acutely unmanageable, and I’ve done so intermittently throughout life. Recovering from sudden cardiac arrest is proving to be the most unmanageable thing I’ve faced. The trauma escalated in June when I started having trouble moving and speaking. Those episodes felt worse than waking up from a coma in the ICU and realizing that I’d just been on the brink of death. Don’t get me wrong, waking up into that mess was terrible. But then I started to improve. I got to go home. When my movement and speech disorder spontaneously began one day in June, I had to wonder if the worst wasn’t yet behind me. I started to worry about whether I’d remain able to walk. What else would start to spontaneously happen during those episodes? How long would they get, and how much more frequent? In short, I felt that I was slipping downhill into a very dark chasm.
My therapist diagnosed me with PTSD. This seemed reasonable. But so did fearing that something terrible might be happening to my body, as it proceeded to fall apart around me.
I can tell my therapist is doing a good job for several reasons. One of those reasons is that I do not enjoy our sessions. Not one bit! One of my therapist’s early homework assignments was to journal about what balance means to me. I’ll address my answers to that question in a bit, but even more interesting was the fact that I had an intensely negative reaction to the idea of “balance” and the suggestion that, perhaps, I needed to cultivate more of it. We decided this aversion had a lot to do with coping mechanisms I’d developed to deal with past “small-T” traumas.
The truth is, balance wasn’t what I was going for in my younger years. Maybe it still isn’t. But what happens to all living things that lose their balance?
I had an inkling, from gardening, that balance is pretty critical to sustaining life. I started looking for articles about the biological meaning of balance to make sure I understood the situation.
From the EPA:
“Biological balance refers to the interrelationships among organisms, including…the ability of ecological systems to sustain themselves over time. Balance is a dynamic characteristic rather than a fixed state.”
Ok, so balance has to do with sustainment of a biological system, not just a single entity. It’s a dynamic process, which makes sense. I often feel like trying to find balance is a losing battle: you find it for a second, then the wind blows and it’s gone. I also gather that in a living system, the interrelationships between parts is a critical component. None of us operate as lonely islands. Our environment affects us on every level.
Elsewhere, on ScienceDaily, I read that scientists are learning that on a cellular level, life requires “the ability…to find a middle ground, balancing between robustness and adaptability.” This makes intuitive sense, too. Being overly focused on stability alone would prepare a living system for some situations well, and others poorly. Successful life forms learn to alternate between cozily stabilizing and adapting to new, crazy situations that present out of the blue. They find the middle way.
There are also some lessons from my own backyard. I am ecstatic every time I happen upon a praying mantis. We had an overabundance of aphids at one point, leading to black sooty mold on several plants—that’s when Mrs. Mantis started hanging around one corner of the garden. Problem solved! She eats the critters that threaten to throw our farmhouse’s mini-ecosystem out of balance.
We used to have professionals spray foundation bushes for mosquitos. Then we saw we had a few praying mantis friends. We’ve since stopped using chemicals other than right around entrance points and indoors. We graded the yard to control wet areas near the house. We cut back or eliminated some of the foundation shrubs. We started using what nature gave us, and thinking in terms of overall balance instead of spot-treating bug issues one at a time.
I’m a lazy gardener. I like to create self-sustaining systems that lead to less work down the road. So it’s odd that in tending to my emotional and personal health, I have a tendency to jump to extremes. I spent a lot of my twenties and early thirties in the rat race, like so many other young professionals in the D.C. capitol region. Now it takes long hikes and an insanely healthy diet to offset years of pent-up stress. Looking back, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that balance was an option, and I wasn’t even trying to be rich and famous—I was just another Millennial trying to pay off school debt and maybe, one day, afford a mortgage.
Balance in my garden means sometimes I try something that doesn’t work. I lose a shrub or some flowers die. A vegetable gets plagued by insects or a disease, and we miss an entire harvest that year. I can afford that for a few plants in my garden. Who can afford such losses and upheavals in their own lives, though? Who can sacrifice an internal organ here or their small business there? Who in the U.S. right now can afford much of any interruption during the prime earning years of their lives? As someone who has had many interruptions: I could not afford them. Physically, emotionally, and financially, I could not afford them. That’s why I find myself where I am today.
I know some people set themselves up better from the beginning. Some people have really great safety nets from family or live in less individualistic societies. Some people don’t sustain many health and relationship shocks, or at least not until they’re older and better established. There are also those who stay in balance because they find ways not to let traumatic events rewire their brain.
One of my favorite books is Bessel van der Kolk’s New York Times bestselling masterpiece The Body Keeps the Score. Here’s a quote from the author’s website:
“Trauma interferes with the brain circuits that involve focusing, flexibility, and being able to stay in emotional control. A constant sense of danger and helplessness promotes the continuous secretion of stress hormones, which wreaks havoc with the immune system and the functioning of the body’s organs. Only making it safe for trauma victims to inhabit their bodies, and to tolerate feeling what they feel, and knowing what they know, can lead to lasting healing.”
Van der Kolk shows how yoga, play, and other processing methods can be utilized to regain balance. There’s no one method that works for everyone. I’m very early in my PTSD journey, but I already know that yoga, baking, and hiking play a role.
So, back to my therapist’s initial question. What does balance mean to me? Here’s some free association after my preliminary research:
Middle way between stability and adaptability
Purpose: allows life to sustain itself
A dynamic process requiring tiny, constant adjustments
Requires core strength and a deep understanding of one’s own values
Physical, emotional, and mental—it happens (or doesn’t) at every level of my being, from my cells to my soul
Inner and outer—involves interrelationships between my system’s parts as well as my relationships with others and my environment
Something my brain no longer maintains in the background—I have to consciously think about balance when I get tired and it becomes hard to walk or speak
I’m curious. What does balance mean to you?