Hypervigilance

Or, Stay Ready so You Don’t Have to Get Ready

Photo by Dominik Berger on Unsplash

As a Child….

*Parent had a bad day at work.

• Make yourself scarce.

*Sister had a tough day at school; Parent was cruel about it.

• Make her laugh to cheer her up

*Brother is volatile/ready to physically assault, then gaslight

• Appease! Fawn! Fawn! Fawn!

(Juggle this responsibility while carrying the knowledge that catering to any one for too long will result in the others viewing you as two-faced for a time. They have no interest in comforting one another. The one closest to my age is nine years my senior and will graduate high school before I even leave grade school. But I had my position and I played it. The mood of the house was up to me.)

*“Cousins” in your age group, that live in the city- love to gang up on you, the youngest, the most naive, the only little girl, to play pranks because you are from the bad area across the river, considered “sheltered” (what a joke) and “backward”.

*You become increasingly distrustful of peers, those tattletales who befriended you only to learn your core so they could ridicule and discard it later. Yes, children can be cruel, but when they are with a child that already has a precarious homelife with Adults, the scars run deep and linger long.

*Even Teachers in your city (whose city government and school district was riddled with nepotism of the worst sort) could be more childish than their students, not afraid to openly criticize or ostracize a particular student if it meant they would gain status with the more popular children. Elementary through High school. This was a thing. Happened to me, happened to others. Again, a child deals with peers, then this, then returns home, which is no refuge. The brain literally rewires itself to cope¹.

Inside and outside the home, there is a fight for survival. A hope of coming out alive. There is no refuge and the child is stuck in different soul sucking environments day in and day out. They must stay aware. It is not up for debate. It simply is life. You stop hoping that it will get better because the hope makes you impatient and impatience can cloud your senses. You have to know your surroundings, and so you take it one day, one hour, one half hour, one quarter hour, one minute at a time. Hope will have to wait til you are free. Try not to think too much about that freedom thing, either. You don’t even know what that is. Or how to get it. You just know that you ain’t got it yet. Act accordingly, child.

A lifetime of mistrust, second guessing, people pleasing, hyperawareness, poor sleep, poor coping mechanisms, and now a nervous system that has never been regulated and can best be described as a hairless cat in a cold room.

As an Adult

*Sit in spaces where you can see all the exits

*Yelling and hot bursts of anger (from anyone) make your teeth clench and your fists tighten until your acrylics shout out

*Search faces for shifts in mood- try to hear what is not being said- try to respond accordingly

*Spend time agonizing over plans- think about time as ifs and thens: “If this happens, then I’ll do this” or “If this is said then I’ll say this”

The goal is what it always was- Safety!!!

The Fallout

And yet, sometimes your preemptive preparations fail and your nervous system, already a gory trainwreck, explodes. (implodes?)

One day, decades later, you are exhausted. You can’t think, but that’s no different than any other time. You’ve never had “normal” thought processes, you’ve always excelled in your own way, you’ve made the best out of how your brain functions.

But one day you are with your friend, and you hear her say something particularly flippant to her child in the fit of anger (about the child’s sibling) and you see the child internally flinch. You are shocked about how angry it makes you. You will not let this happen to someone you love if you can help it. As an adult, you know adults can be wrong. They can lash out. But they can be held accountable. You take your friend aside (telling the child to go ahead of us into the restaurant and pick the seat she wants) and take her to task. Gently, because that’s who we are. Your friend is not your parent, and understands the situation. You have chosen your own family and know that these are good people. Imperfect humans. Perfectly imperfect. Your friend understands that the apology needs to match the disrespect, so as we wait for our food, she makes amends with her child. You see the child’s eyes light up with love and safety. You feel good.

Later you reflect on what happened. You are semi-alone, in your big chair at the foot of the bed. Your beloved Big Spoon is not-so-softly snoring in your king sized bed. You softly but sternly tell them to turn on their side. They grumble and do. Now in silence (until the cat strolls in, anyway) you think about the differences in how your beloved niece’s (I’m Auntie Crash to all my friends kids, ages 1 to 30, good heavens!!!) situation went, and how yours would have gone. Parent’s flippant criticism would have hung in the air like an icicle, and anyone thinking Parent was going to apologize to any child could expect a good cussin out. The mood in the car would shift to uneasy tension, and everyone would be mad at you for being stupid enough to get yelled at.

It dawns on you, that you have, in fact, been through a lot. You are not the person you could have been. You do not look back on childhood fondly; all the stories you tell, although you now laugh when telling them (of course your sense of humor is dark and warped, you wouldn’t be a survivor if it wasn’t at least a lil bit.) leave your friends with looks of horror. But you also realize that you *may* need help. That the panic attacks *are* getting worse. That you *would* like to learn the “healthy” ways of coping. (We have never been able to fool ourselves into thinking our coping mechanisms were healthy long term or, hell, even safe, lol!) Perhaps we *do* deserve the life we want, some true rest, peace, and a lil joy?

Dear reader, I am not impressed by my hypervigilance. I am not proud of it, it is not a badge of honor, I don’t brag about it. I see how some people who are not hypervigilant, never had to be. I am jealous. Not envious, because I don’t want to take that away from them. I just wish I’d had it too.

These ones are relaxed because their adrenaline is not overloading their systems every time they leave their homes or interact with other people.

I am jealous of how freely they pick a seat at the table. How they think it is some sort of gift that I am the first one to notice things. “I would have never seen that, Ashe,” they say, or, “I never noticed,”. No, of course you didn’t. You never had to eat supper away from the windows because of fear of being shot. Of course not.

This hypervigilance is the unfortunate consequence of having things happen to me that never had to happen to me. My stomach churns as I survey my surroundings. Anything or anyone, outside of the little home I have made as safe as possible, must be analyzed, scrutinized- because I am, indeed, traumatised.

I still struggle mightily with how unprotected I was during those formative years. It was always someone else’s responsibility to look after me at any given moment. But no one was paying attention. They all failed in one way or another.

And no, as of today, they do not care. They acknowledge it, of which I am told I should be grateful (I am not- that’s an upcoming essay though), but their (private) acknowledgements make them feel guilty. I will not absolve them of their guilt, as I am supposed to do apparently (I will not- again, upcoming essay) and so they feel embarrassed. The embarrassment makes them angry (I am not playing emotional ball, I reckon) and so I am the problem. I am the drama, even tho I no longer come around. I suppose my absence spoke louder than I ever could. Good.

I’m older now and I can not fathom forcing myself to be around abusers and perpetrators just because they’re older now too, so we should at least let bygones be bygones. No thank you. My nervous system can’t take it and I won’t test it. I will stay where I have chosen to root myself because I am consistently watered and consistently safe. I am finally ok being their problem because I have become my own solution. C’est la vie, biatches.

And so it goes. Or so it went. As of today, I am quite the homebody. Husband and I love staying in, reading, eating, drawing, painting, writing, guitaring, napping, and talking. Occasionally, when my health is okay (if you’ve been here a while you know my health will never be good again) we have small gatherings. We have our beloved friends that also are homebodies with small, comfy homes. We take turns hanging out at each others’ abodes. We’ve been with each other for years. We’re a ragtag bunch. But we’re one big safe space. It’s nice.

Husband works part time and is my part time caretaker. I am now a full time artist, emphasis on writing, tho I’m finding my voice in art. I’m still looking for my medium. Oil pastels or color pencils? Both? I still worry. I still overthink. I shut down. I go to therapy. I try not to rock my boat.

I try not to let the past make me up in its image. I will probably remain vigilant, as one must, but not overly so.

I sometimes resent that it is still such hard work.

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1. Cross, Dorthie et al. “Neurobiological Development in the Context of Childhood Trauma.” Clinical psychology : a publication of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association vol. 24,2 (2017): 111-124. doi:10.1111/cpsp.12198