After a seemingly longer than expected Labour day weekend of wading through the crowds at DragonCon while also attempting to survive the sticky all-encompassing heat of the late southern southern summer, we took a day to recover. At least we though it was a day to recover.
A late sleep, a relaxed breakfast, and visit to our favorite donut shop before some marketing and chores seemed the perfect counter balance to the crush that was DragonCon. Only, it wasn’t quite recovery. Somehow, in some way we simply don’t understand, we got triggered. For us our anxiety and PTSD symptoms often come out through our body. This is the result of learning at a young age to ignore and avoid awareness of things we couldn’t know. We had to not know in order to survive, and then we spent a lifetime practicing those skills.
We found ourselves hurting. Muscles along the sides and back of our abdomen painfully reacting, cramping, aching, our stomach churning with a unique nausea, our arms alternating aching and burning. Our body reliving some past experience we only vaguely know about. Sitting in the car with our wife, surrounded by sunshine and the anonymity of a grocery store parking lot, some part of us was in overdrive. Never mind we were safe in the moment, inside some part of us wasn’t.
Why it was coming up right then, we didn’t understand. It just was, and there was nothing much to do about it. We did our best to acknowledge it, to take care of ourselves and to move on.
It ebbed and flowed over the course of the day. We managed the marketing, and eventually the chores (there are now clean clothes in the house for the coming week.) Yet we are still no closer to understanding why this is coming up now.
After the sun went down and things calmed down some inside of us, my wife decided she wanted a cool, sweet treat. So we walked down the street. A neighborhood burgerey sells gourmet frozen pops from a local vendor and this was our destination. We arrived to find a few tables full even late on Labour day, and a pop case with only 4 choices remaining deep inside.
We got a Cookies-n-Cream pop, which we discovered (much to the joy of some part of us) has whole, real chocolate chip cookies inside.
And you know what? That unexpected cookie made us feel just a bit better.