Dizzy!

No, I don’t mean this kind of Dizzy.

I mean this kind of dizzy.

I can tell my anxiety is seething with the start of another fall semester when I walk over the Burlington St. Bridge. Out of nowhere, a wave of dizziness hits me. Well, the wave must come from somewhere. Everything comes from somewhere. Regardless, I’m surprised when a wave of dizziness hits me as I walk over a bridge I’ve walked over countless times.

***

I mean, it’s not like I have vertigo but it’s not like I don’t have vertigo. It’s not like I’m overwhelmed by dizziness, but it’s not like I’m not overwhelmed by dizziness.

Dizziness really threw me for a loop last fall. It was the precursor to my something of a breakdown that wasn’t really a breakdown but wasn’t not really a breakdown. Read that sentence 10 times fast. It’ll make you dizzy. I’d get dizzy while I was sitting in meetings. Or sitting at my computer. The dizziness scared me. Surely, I was dying. I realized I wasn’t dying. Not in the physical, sense. Parts of us are always dying off. No, last fall I was just a little dizzy. This fall too, I guess.

I was terrified of heights as a kid. I remember Dad making me go to the top of the Sears tower in a trip to Chicago. I threw a massive temper tantrum that, in hindsight, might have been a massive panic attack. And then I thought it was really cool when we got to the top. I remember Dad talking a pilot into letting us go up in his little Cessna at the St. Paul airport. I was frozen with fear in the backseat. Again, likely in the throes of another panic attack. Again, I told everybody at school how cool it was the next day.

Everybody who knows me has realized I’m an anxious person. It took me until I was 45 to realize that I’m an anxious person. Slow learner, I guess.

***

The funniest thing about experiencing anxiety is that I don’t have any sense of having experienced it in my twenties or thirties. I didn’t get dizzy. I wasn’t afraid of heights. I don’t know the extent to which, as a coping mechanism, I learned to not notice the things I was feeling or experiencing. To ignore or repress them. God knows that was one way to survive the overwhelming things I felt and experienced as a child. Ignore and repress the things you are feeling or experiencing at your own risk, kind reader. One something is conjured it never goes away. You can’t outrun the things you feel and experience.

It is not natural for human beings to be up in the air. Ask any of our ancestors. Getting to close to the edge of a cliff is a dangerous thing. And yet here I am, flying in airplanes, walking over bridges, and managing a schedule of countless tasks each week. And here I am noticing a spell of dizziness as I walk over the Burlington Street Bridge.

A little dizzy? So be it. One foot follows the other and then I am over the bridge. I’d rather notice and feel things than not notice and feel things.