This week at Shangrilogs - July 26

Return of the panic.

On Sunday, Ben and I parked a car at a trailhead with the intention of hiking the ~15 miles home from there, and then driving our other car from the house to fetch car #1. In theory this would have worked fine, but somewhere along miles in-the-car-on-the-way-there and 12, I had a multi-hours long panic attack — my first in years. 

So we didn’t go get the car. We left it, and I spent Sunday afternoon pampering myself and doing “inner work” to figure out why exactly my much recovered anxiety made an ugly return. Of course, anxiety ebbs and flows. It’s a bodily function, and in being so, it never fully goes away. You learn to manage it, use it, quell it, etc., but you never truly rid yourself of it. I knew my proverbial tea kettle was getting a little too hot, and it just happened to boil over somewhere around 12,000 feet.

Also, this is why the paid edition is so late today. I rode my bike from the house back to the trailhead this morning to get the car. And it wasn’t until I was showered and coffeed and was working that I thought, “oh shit.” 

For the first two-thirds of my relationship with Ben, every time we’d go on a vacation, I’d immediately devolve into some sweeping illness of headaches, nausea, gut issues, etc. But there was never anything wrong with me. I didn’t eat anything weird, I wasn’t having altitude sickness, I didn’t catch something; it was just that my body finally got the OK signal to relax, and relax it did. It would just give up entirely after months and months of weathering stress. 

That wasn’t very sustainable or enjoyable, so I did the work and mostly fixed it. Mostly.