Something that I guess I never expected with the trauma of what happened with Robin is the after effects of it all. I feel as though I’ve handled my grief well and I feel good about where she is and what I believe. I don’t feel sad often anymore and when I do, I know that it’s ok to feel that way. I know that she’s with us all the time. All of that I feel confident about.
What stayed with me is the anxiety and the fear that something like this could happen all over again. It’s 1:28 AM and I was about to fall asleep without my phone on silent. I do this because I’m afraid something bad will happen in the middle of the night and my family will be trying to get ahold of me and they won’t be able to reach me. I’m afraid to wake up to 20 missed calls from them because something bad happened and they needed to reach me. It may be devastating waking up to a phone call that changes your life but it would be even worse to miss those calls.
I don’t think this is a rational way of thinking. Most people don’t go to bed every night in fear that they might wake up to find out that someone they love is sick or gone.
If I get an unexpected call from my mom or anyone in my family, or even just a text that says “call me”, I immediately jump to worst case scenario. I brace myself for the worst. I answer the phone in fear every single time.
These are strange things for me to admit because in my day to day life, I don’t recognize that these reactions are not “normal”. These anxieties are not something that everyone faces but when they’ve been your normal for so many years, you genuinely forget that this is not the case for everyone.
These anxieties manifest in many different ways for me. Tonight, I had go online to figure out how to keep my phone on silent with the exception of phone calls from my family so that I could actually fall asleep without hearing every notification sound on my phone. Luckily, there is a way. There’s a small sense of relief in that. But then also, not at all when you think about why I need it to be that way.
I’m always working toward positive thinking and seeing the good in everything, however, it does feel like I’m always waiting for the next tragedy to hit my family. I was so fully and completely unprepared to go through what we went though with Robin and I just cannot let myself be blindsided like that again. Even though every night I lose sleep thinking about the phone call that changed everything, there is a small part of me that thinks maybe we have been through enough. Maybe I don’t constantly have to be bracing myself for the next thing to hit. For now, I just do what I have to do to ease my anxieties and then I let the moment pass.
They say the pain of loss gets easier and I do think this is true on a day to day level. I think the trauma stays with us though in ways we never would have imagined and in ways we don’t even notice. I didn’t really have a point to this post tonight. It just happened and then I felt like I should write about it. But I think the takeaway here is that it’s completely okay to feel these feelings when they happen but it’s also really important to remember how powerful positivity can be. Feel your feelings, whatever they are for as long as you need to and then push on to some positive affirmations and say your grateful’s. It makes all the difference.
