About That Midlife Crisis…

(And why I’m blogging about it)

Oh, just because my midlife crisis is spectacular and I don’t want to forget a single blissful moment of it.

Jokes aside, I hope blogging about things will keep me from backsliding into the bad habits that broke my brain.

I turned 40 a few months ago, but just before I turned 40, I woke up disabled. Literally. A few weeks before the big birthday, I went to bed the picture of health, woke up broken. The month before that, I took a huge loss as a self-employed business owner. A client screwed me over for more than $10,000 for work already performed, in a business year when I was walking a fine financial line. And before that all happened? I was just a really physically active, high-stress, super intense, Type A personality with anxiety. Yeah, I said it: I have high-functioning anxiety.

I used anxiety to fuel multiple businesses, intense workouts, athletic competitions, and various achievements. Anxiety gave me the energy to worry about everyone else and try to fix their problems when they asked. Everybody’s favourite codependent rock, I was anxious from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep, exhausted. To most people though, it just looked like I was a very intense, very efficient, highly motivated, goal-oriented go-getter.

Until my brain broke one day, and overnight I became dependent.

My husband became my caregiver, which we weren’t expecting to be a thing for many, many more years, if ever. Like most couples, I suppose. I went to bed perfectly healthy October 18, and woke up disabled October 19. I struggled to walk unassisted, used a cane sometimes, and periodically peed myself. Good times! 40 is the new…94?

How come when men have a midlife crisis, they buy a super sexy car? Maybe date someone super sexy to go with it? But I, in true over-achiever fashion, had to take midlife crisis to a whole new level.

I have left-sided deficits that took months to improve. They still remain to a large extent, despite my hard work in physio and neuro rehab. For months, my brain has frequently quit communicating with my body. When that happens, I lose the ability to move.

Imagine being unable to move no matter how hard you try, until your brain reestablishes the connection to your body.

I spent a few months with wild tremors in my arms and torso. I even had my body slam itself against hard objects a few times just for fun. The tremors looked like I was having some type of seizure, so being out in public wasn’t a good time. I had no control over it. My speech would slur sometimes. I fall down the stairs more often than I’d like. No longer power-lifting at the gym, I needed help carrying my dinner plate to the table. I needed help dressing and undressing, putting shoes on, walking. I wasn’t able to drive. Thanks to the ahole client, my husband works two jobs to support us while I can’t work.

Basically, life was awful and hard and I suddenly didn’t know who I was anymore.

I couldn’t do the activities that were a huge part of my active life. I soon found out that I’d subconsciously used those activities to cope with my anxiety, so I was really at a loss and not doing well. A+ midlife crisis! Suddenly my world was very small and terrifying and I felt finished at 40. What possible future did I have now? I really struggled with not having any control over my own body or my life anymore.

Over the course of 2019, most of my ‘worst case’ nightmare scenarios came to pass, like some cosmic being had read my diary and decided to send all the bad things I feared crashing down on my head.

Just as I started to regain my mobility (and regained bladder control, thank goodness) the world entered a pandemic. A couple of weeks after that, my neurologist phoned. My long awaited MRI had revealed a pons brain lesion, which was the source of all my neurological problems. Yay! Just in case life isn’t challenging enough, I have an autoimmune disease called Multiple Sclerosis and part of my brain stem is damaged. This is a most spectacular midlife crisis, yes? As usual, my life was a splendid mess.

I’m sure stress was the main cause of my broken brain.

The preceding 6 months had been incredibly stressful for me, both as an Advanced Care Paramedic and as a business owner. I was awake for days on end: dealing with other people’s garbage, several people took advantage of my kindness then happily screwed me over. I was barely taking the time to eat, working nonstop…

For most of 2019, I felt stressed to the point that I’m surprised the top of my head didn’t fly off. That period of my life was 10/10 stressful. My 30s were generally a 7/10, and the first three decades of my life were a 9/10.

Why don’t I just relax, you might be thinking. Because my brain literally doesn’t know how, and now I’ve burned a lesion into it! (Not really, but I like to joke that my MS is actually just so many people on my nerves for so long, the surface of my brain has singe marks from having to deal with it.)

I’m tired of keeping secrets for the sake of not making people uncomfortable or because the folks who did the bad things don’t want anyone to know about it.

Fun fact: I’m a domestic abuse survivor. I know, right? Me, of all people. Just goes to show that no one is immune, I guess. When you spend years and years living in a minefield of violence and rage and verbal abuse, I’m pretty sure it changes how your brain is wired. About a decade ago, I was diagnosed with PTSD after I finally got free but I had stuff to do and things to accomplish and people to look after, so I white-knuckled my way through life for years, because only the weak can’t handle their stuff, right?

More recently, the label ‘complex’ was added to the diagnosis. Complex PTSD or C-PTSD is what they call it when instead of one traumatic event, you endure multiple traumas over time, like in the case of child abuse, domestic abuse, or living in a war zone. I didn’t pay a ton of attention to that diagnosis either; because I was tough as nails, ergo I couldn’t have PTSD. I survived every crappy thing life ever threw at me, nothing could break me!

Until my own immune system broke my brain.

Now, I’ve just had enough of feeling like life is a pressure cooker. I’m learning to listen to my body instead of powering through exhaustion, sickness, and bad days. Not that I have much choice in the matter anymore. Since October 2019, when I’m tired my body pulls the e-brake and I’m done. And symptomatic. I can’t power through it despite my best efforts.

I kind of feel like I didn’t give my brain or body any other choice besides taking drastic measures. I’m not so good at catching subtle hints. A gentle metaphorical knocking at the door doesn’t get me to pay attention. The universe typically has to send a Molotov cocktail through my window, and boy did it ever. Lit the whole damn place up and burned it to the ground.

My doctors (whom I all adore) have given me several firm but supportive lectures about managing my stress if I don’t want to end up in a wheelchair. I guess I better learn some new skills instead of ‘powering through.’

I’m learning that I can feel my feelings and nothing bad is going to happen. I’m also realizing that the way I was living didn’t serve me at all.

It wasn’t good for me and I was constantly living just to survive. Forget thrive, and none of that ‘live your best life’ stuff…I just wanted to live without danger or threat to my safety.

Just a couple of weeks before my brain broke, I realized that subconsciously, for the past decade I’d been making decisions as a result of my conditioning. My conscious brain knew that I’d been safe for over a decade, knew that I was married to the most amazing man. He doesn’t have a narcissistic or abusive bone in his body. He doesn’t even raise his voice if we’re disagreeing. I was in my thirties before I realized that people could disagree with their loved ones without screaming, threatening, shoving, hitting, or name-calling.

Up until then, I’d thought that all that behaviour was a normal part of relationships and interaction with people you lived with.

So I had the mind-blowing epiphany that I was still living my life like I was in an abusive relationship out of habit (conditioning) and I was starting to work through some stuff. I figured now might be the time since I was in a safe environment with a supportive partner…and I actually felt pretty good! I was finally over the pneumonia I’d been sick with all summer, I was doing a fitness challenge and walking outside every day for an hour, thinking deep thoughts to work on myself and planning how to ensure my emergency response business survived following the huge, crippling financial loss thanks to that jackass, thieving client. (Yes, I’m aware that I’m still mad. I’m a work in progress, not a saint.) And then…did I mention my brain broke one morning in October?

So after having my health and independence taken away from me in an instant, I’ve had lots of time for self-reflection.

Sitting around the last several months, unable to do much, was a great time to reevaluate.

At the moment, I don’t know that I care that my 15 year old business is possibly finished; being a paramedic is stressful enough, and running an emergency response company adds a whole other layer. I still have another business that I’ve had for many years, making soaps and bath bombs and whatnot, and I do find it really relaxing to be creating things. But being self-employed is stressful, at least for those who actually paid all our bills with an actual business that requires more from us than ‘working from home with just an internet connection!’ and an automated recruitment funnel to a downline.

Maybe I’m meant to do something else but damned if I know what it is right now. Maybe if I learn who I really am without other people’s expectations influencing me, and my own anxiety driving my life and making all my decisions, who knows where I might end up or how my life might look?

All I know right now is there has to be more to life than white-knuckling it from one stressful situation to another.

There just has to be! After months of being at home (pre-pandemic) and unable to use my normal coping mechanisms of work, more work, put some fires out for other people, work out, light myself on fire to keep other people warm, then work some more… I realized that yes, crappy things happen in my life regularly but it’s really my reactions to the crappy things that make me miserable. My brain is just wired to fly into fight or flight response at the teeniest, tiniest provocation. I need to retrain it.

I feel like the past year has knocked me to rock-bottom on many levels, but I also feel okay about it. Most days.

When you have anxiety, and everything you’ve been stressed about happening for years actually happens, the stress reduces. Sounds weird I know, but if my worst-case scenarios have happened and I’m still surviving, then I figure I don’t need to stress about it anymore.

I don’t want to be this anxious, stressed out person any longer. For definitely the last decade and pretty much for my entire adult life, I worked 90 hour weeks. I was exhausted from living in fight or flight mode most of the time. I just can’t keep living as a tightly-wound workaholic who never stops and finds it impossible to relax. As my neurologist explained, stress negatively affects my immune system. For some reason, my immune system has decided to attack my central nervous system for funzies.

Now I just want a minimally stressed existence and some slow living. I want to take care of myself for the first time in my life and just find contentment. If I can learn to calm the hyper-reactive stress state I’ve been living in most of my life and achieve peaceful contentment, that’ll be my greatest achievement ever.

What if…

If years of stress and anxiety helped break my brain, what if I purposefully created good moments and more good memories? Would they eventually spackle my brain lesions? It makes me laugh to picture it.

Once I started to recover and regain some mobility, I created some good moments in simple circumstances to cheer myself up.

My husband finds it amusing that when I experience something really good, I say it’s magickal.

I want to cultivate more of that. I’m starting to think it’s the magickal little things that are really important in life and I need more of them. My first hike almost 6 months after disability was magickal, before the pandemic hit. So was my discovery of a pasta and brie dish that’s the most decadent, indulgent thing you’ll ever put in your face. On a cold night, a hot bath and climbing into a bed pre-warmed by a heating pad? Also magickal.

Might sound dumb to some people, but one of the great things about a midlife crisis is, you stop caring what other people think. I didn’t care a ton once I entered my thirties, but I care even less now. I’ve spent my whole life thinking that if I put myself out enough, if I went without enough, if I endured enough hardship, if I took care of enough people and fixed enough situations…the nausea knot in the pit of my stomach would eventually go away. So far, nope. And I’m a big believer in, stop doing what isn’t working.

The midlife crisis and the disability that prevents me from staying busy and distracted has also helped me consider how bizarre it is that not only do I struggle to ever truly relax, but I don’t feel really worthy.

I resist taking time for myself, doing nice things for myself, allowing myself to feel good or be happy.

My husband does his best to ensure I’m taken care of and he does nice things for me often, but while he’s been able to put me on a beach a few times, it’s almost impossible for me to relax in my head.

I’m sure it sounds weird to many, but I spent a lot of years in a place where happiness was weaponized. If it was ever apparent that I felt good or I felt happy or I was enjoying something, I’d be made to feel miserable. My ex used to destroy any belongings I cherished when he was angry, or if I was smiling for any reason I’d be told, “What are you smiling for? You look like an idiot.” (That’s the polite, cleaned up version.)

I think when you’re punished for being happy, when it’s not allowed, you learn to not allow it as a means of self-preservation. It’s a very hard pattern to break, but the last several months of sitting around let me at least identify it. Now I need to unlearn my bad brain habits.

As my recovery continues, my new goal in life isn’t business success or saving the world or making tons of money. It’s just to make space to find the magickal little things that help me be mindful of the present moment and make me feel at peace. Now seems like a good time to keep getting more centred and reevaluating my priorities, as so many others are doing. I want to believe that fate broke everything (the world as we know it, the economy, me, etc.) to make things better eventually.

I hope things have fallen apart so they’ll fall into place.

So welcome to my mid-life crisis! My carefully ordered and tightly controlled life is a splendid mess, and so am I! Could be worse. Could also be better. No more intense type A shenanigans for this auto-immune introvert; I need alone time and simplicity! Covid’s taken care of the first part, I’m in charge of the rest.

Click here for my thoughts on coping with Covid.

Click here for some info about MS.