Hyper-alert Heroes! Graham here.

I’m making some big changes in my life these past few weeks. Starting with the smallest things.

We’ll get to that, but first, a wee trip down panic memory lane. . .

Delightful.

Memories

When I was 23, I had a panic attack so wild it felt like it reshaped the world.

I was in my bedroom at the time, and I was not in a good space mentally, to say the least. Just a few short weeks earlier, I’d experienced a traumatic, life-altering drug experience, which would end up rearranging my sense of reality for about two years.

Ouch?

But I didn’t know that yet.

At this point all I knew was that I was filled with terror every hour of every day, and kept having impossible-to-explain freakouts like the one that was about to happen.

The shrinking universe

It was 10pm, and the problem was simple. I had become convinced that the universe was too small.

The whole thing was shrinking, and me with it.

The problem wasn’t physical. If I, and everyone else, were all shrinking at the same rate - which thankfully did seem to be the case - then we’d all still fit just fine.

And yet, the feeling of living in a suddenly much-smaller world was deeply distressing. It continued to upset me for some time, until I eventually, somehow, got to sleep.

Back then, this sort of thing was fairly routine for me.

Like the feeling that the world was actually a dream. That I might have been dead or alive, and worse, that there was no longer a firm difference between these two states. These odd sensations would overwhelm me most days, waxing and waning in intensity.

(Hear more about that strange time in my life here in this podcast ep I made with the ABC, if you’re game…)

So what was that all about?

Looking back on the problem of the shrunken universe, it speaks to me now of the contracting power of fear.

When you’re scared, it feels like the fear is all there is. Massive, all-consuming.

And that was very much my experience in that particular panic attack. My body may have been shrinking in-step with the universe, but my feelings remained as big as ever. The terror in my bedroom now filling the cosmos.

This was my life back then. Fears so big I could no longer truly dwell in my body at all, and so I lived in a mind increasingly lost in thought.

When even your body is not a safe place, the world is very strange indeed.

Prone to terrifying feats of abstraction.

A growing universe

I stayed in this terrified (and terrifying) state for about two years.

As if that panic attack was a kind of premonition, my world really did get smaller. Week to week, there were less and less things I could do without freaking out completely.

Things slowly started to shift with one simple decision. One ordinary day, I made a choice to stop avoiding the things that scared me. To do one thing, each day, outside my ever-shrinking comfort zone .

To grow my world again. And most importantly, to allow the fear space in my life, and in my body. To invite it willingly by doing what scared me most.

It started with a trip to the dreaded supermarket. Nine months later, it ended with me jumping out of a plane (with a parachute).

Looking back, I don't know if it was courage or just raw desperation. But I slowly began to feel safe in my body again. And for the rest of my twenties, life was relatively calm.

Familiar fear

It’s almost fifteen years since that strange time, but I find myself now in a similar bind.

The reasons are different. Chronic pain. Life upheaval. My 30s have been anything but calm. I have less mind-bending abstractions to deal with, thankfully. But here it is again these past few years, the hour-by-hour dilemma of tension and fear.

My body is once more a place in which I don’t feel safe.

Like in my twenties, I know things need to change. But this time around, something tells me it’s less about pushing myself to do more. So I’m taking a gentler approach.

My first instinct has been to tease it out with language. I write pages at a time, to give these overwhelming feelings form and shape. I write newsletters. I’m writing a book.

All this makes the whole thing that much less lonely. Something that can be named and shared with others. Something that isn’t just ‘my’ pain but ‘the’ pain — part of the shared experience of a sensitive life.

This has always helped me.

But it’s not enough anymore.

I need to find a way back to my body.

I need to make my body a safe place to live once more.

One short phrase in my journal, that says so much in so few words:

I refuse to keep feeling this way.

I don’t know exactly what this means just yet, but I’m finding some clues.

Here are two recent clues I’ll share:

Clue #1 — I think it’s time to ask for help again, which is something I’d largely given up on. It’s hard when you don’t fit the simple ‘I asked for help and now I’m better!’ mold. After years of doing all the things you’re ‘supposed’ to be doing, and still feeling sad or scared a bunch of the time, it makes sense that you can start to wonder… what’s the point? But I’m tired of feeling so alone in all this, tired of feeling like no one can help me. I am ready to take that oh so tender, risky step of trying to find others who can at least understand what I’m going through. That in itself seems pretty huge to me? Even if I don’t yet know where to start…

Clue #2 — I’ve started doing yoga. As in, I’ve done yoga four days out of the last five, having maybe done it four times in my whole life before that. It's the kind of suggestion I'd usually roll my eyes at ('that's not going to make a dent in what I'm dealing with') apparently there’s pretty good evidence that yoga can help frightened people feel more at home in their bodies. I’ve started small - just doing the most basic guided yoga on Youtube. Specifically, a video from Yoga With Adriene.

I don’t know whether I’ll keep this up, but like with Clue #1, maybe the point is the trying? Adriene (a real-life angel sent to guide us all gently back into our bodies?) has a saying:

“Find what feels good.”

Her point is that yoga shouldn’t be about getting the poses right, or being good at yoga. Instead it’s about “having an experience”. It’s about feeling good, in your body.

And when I hear her say that, I realise that, for me, this philosophy - “find what feels good” - it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do more generally lately, well beyond the yoga mat. Out of sheer desperation.

Listening to my body

When you live in a frightened body, there’s not much that feels good. So I’ve been paying more attention to the few things that do.

I’ve been doing my best to listen to what my body wants, starting with the smallest things.

Checking in with myself on a walk. ‘Do I want to do my usual loop around the creek, or am I ready to turn back early?’ And around the house. ‘Am I too hot to keep this jumper on? Maybe I’ll take it off before I overheat for once, instead of waiting till I’m finished whatever thing I’m in the middle of?’

Getting a glass of water, going to the bathroom, whatever it might be. All the things I’d usually put off until I’m finished whatever I think I’m supposed to be doing.

These sound like trivial things, but they don’t feel trivial. I feel like I’m relearning how to listen to my body’s signals, which I’m so used to suppressing or ignoring (because so often those signals are overwhelming).

Sleeping when I’m tired

The biggest one? I’ve been sleeping when I’m tired.

Or at the very least, I’ve been getting into bed when I’m tired. Which means, this last week or so, I’ve been in bed half the day.

This in particular feels… almost forbidden?

I even ask my therapist, ‘am I allowed to just spend this much time in bed?’

His answer is simple yet reassuring:

‘Well, you’re tired.’

*My 'sleep when you're tired' inspo. Bodie gets it.*

‘I will believe my body’

I wrote this simple phrase in my journal, which about sums it up:

‘From now on, I will believe my body.’

I’m going to do more of what feels good. And I’m going to do less of what feels bad.

Sounds so simple yes?

The inevitable paradox

Of course there’s a paradox here. What helped in my 20s was to do the very things that scared me, to move through that fear by feeling it.

And I've mostly maintained that 'push through' approach since then. But it feels different now. I’m so tired of feeling afraid.

Years of pushing through that feeling have brought all sorts of valued things into my life. But all that pushing has also worn me out.

As my therapist put it, I am “emotionally fatigued”.

(I underlined that phrase in my journal a few times.)

Maybe for me now it’s not so much ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. Maybe it’s more like, ‘this fear is telling me something has to change’?

So more changes are coming. I just don’t know what they are yet.

But I do know this. I refuse to keep feeling this way.

Knowing even just that much feels potent to me right now. Writing it down, saying it out loud.

I refuse to keep feeling this way.

I wonder where this knowledge will take me next.

— Graham x

Want more? Try these…

Learning To Speak Your Body’s Language
The piece you just read is a few years old now. A LOT has changed in my life since I wrote it. I’d say I’ve very much followed through on that tender desire to listen more to my body. Here’s a piece about how that looks for me lately.
Am I Too Much For Other People?
I’ve even followed through on asking for a little more help. A lot in fact! With mixed results of course. Here’s a piece about how rich and complex and confusing and great it can be when you try new things for your mental health.
Doing The Things That Scare You
Finally, I’ve also rediscovered the need to push myself again and still keep doing what scares me (but hopefully, bringing all of myself along for the ride this time, including the scared parts that just want to curl up on the couch.) If that speaks to you, here’s a piece about that.

Or pop your email in the box below to have pieces like this sent to you every month or so :)

I refuse to keep feeling this way