A Constant Change
As I wrap up the Clementine Toledano Mysteries that have taken up so much of my inner life for the last eight years, I realize how much my own life has changed during the course of all the changes I’ve put my heroine through. Q Toledano started out as a fantasy. A way for me to reminisce about the happiest times in my life when my daily life was starting to feel like it belonged to someone else. But Q and her merry band of eccentrics became so much more than that to me over the years.
By the time I’d completed The Devil’s Luck, Q and the characters that surrounded her were more real to me than my own life. They consumed my psyche. Woke me up at three AM with thoughts and conversations. At the time, I thought it was a way for me to avoid dealing with the unhappiness in my real life. And that’s probably true to a certain extent, but as I slowly tear down this anxiety dragon of mine, I see that these stories were giving me a safe space to process pain and betrayal without confronting either in my reality.
If you’ve read any of the Clementine Toledano Mysteries, you know that Q is not a person to shy away from conflict. She faces it head-on and doesn’t let up until it’s fought out, resolved, and put to rest. It’s probably my most favorite thing about her. Her words never fail her. Her fear and insecurity never overwhelm her into silence. But there’s a reason for that: I give her the right words to say at the right moment. I give her the strength and self-composure to speak up. I give it to her.
So, as I finish this series and make the final copy edits to Devil in Exile, I’m wondering if it’s possible to give that same strength and self-composure to myself. Part of being an anxious person is that you’re constantly on the lookout for danger. You communicate from a point of fear because the fear is the steady undercurrent of your existence. It is the constant.
In Until the Devil Weeps, Derek describes grief like this:
“Everyone has been telling you it’s going to be ok. You’re going to get through this. But they’re all lying to you. There will never be an end to this. You are going to feel this every day for the rest of your life.… What gets easier, is how loud it is. You’ll learn to turn it down. Some days you won’t be able to, but most days you will. Right now, you can’t. It’s too new.…. But we’re going to drown that motherfucker out until you learn to turn it down on your own. You got it?”
Grief and loss never really go away, they’re always there like a constant noise in the room that you don’t notice until everything else goes quiet. And this concept of drowning them out didn’t come for Derek, of course. It came from me.
I spent the better part of two decades drowning out the grief and loss in my own life with music, poetry, partying, cross-country moves, an ill-considered marriage… you name it, I tried it. And because my anxiety dragon grew from that grief when I was a child, the smoke and fear it poured into my life became a part of that steady background noise.
The problem with being constantly afraid is that your body only has two responses: fight or flight. As a stubborn person who hates to be seen as weak or ineffectual, I never back down from a fight. This means my reaction to conflict usually sounds like defensiveness or rage, even though I don’t mean it to be that way. This is also why I keep so much space between myself and just about everyone in my life. When fighting isn’t an option, flying away to a safe space is the only other choice fear will let you have.
After decades of drowning out the fear and grief, confronting it opens up more options. I can ask questions. I can listen to someone without immediately thinking “Fuck, what does this mean to me? Am I in danger?”
But it’s going to take time for this to be natural. Right now it feels alien and uncomfortable. But the world feels slower somehow. I can take in the beauty of the world because I’m not constantly scanning the horizon for danger.
As I was working on repairing the unhappiness in my life years ago, I blamed two culprits: my marriage and my physical health. I thought that if I could just fix those two things, I’d be a happy person. And I wasn’t completely wrong. Fixing those things did make me significantly happier and it lasted for a long time. But there was one more piece to the puzzle that I forgot about: my anxiety.
I’d gotten so practiced at drowning it out, that I sometimes convinced myself I was cured. Now that I’m facing this dickhead dragon and steadily shrinking it down, I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to shrink it completely away. I think this is going to take daily vigilance and attention because inattention is where the dragon grows. When I stop putting myself first. When I deny my emotions. When I avoid pain. That’s where the shadows are and anxiety dragons can only really grow in darkness.
To be honest, I’m a little afraid of how much work this is going to take. But I’m always a little afraid, so it’s not that surprising. But each day the work feels a little less like work and a little more like practice. As a musician and a writer, I’m comfortable with daily practice. It’s how you get good at something. So, I’m trying to reframe this as practicing to be a person who isn’t afraid all the time. So far, it’s really just a quick check-in with my emotional state, “Hey there, little emotion, where are you coming from?” So far, the answer has mostly started with “I’m afraid.” But there have been a few conversations that began with “I’m angry” or “I’m tired” or “I could really use a snack,” and that gives me hope.
Self-help gurus have long said that small changes make big differences. I’ve always thought that was bullshit. Big changes make big differences… duh. And I’ve made some doozies in my life. Ironically, I’m less afraid of completely burning down my world and building a new one than doing something small every day to fix the problem. After years of stubbornly refusing to try the small change thing, I’m trying it now. Because this is not something that can be resolved by a big external change. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Everything is change. It is the one thing we can always count on. Nothing we have today will be exactly the same tomorrow. The trick is to make sure you’re changing for the better.