God of the panic attack

We don’t know what we don’t know.

And this is how it is for most experiences in life, not until we get submerged into a situation, baptized by a grief or a loss or a hurt so deep we feel filled up with it, or we walk close enough next to someone who splinters in a way that we get a front row seat to, do we have the categories and descriptors available to our little brains for that particular brand of suffering.

Pain is an exchange of commodities. When it hits full force, there are neatly packaged answers and clean, clear ways of thinking and understanding our lives that get pulled from our hands, and in turn we are given something to carry that feels a bit more tangled, less defined, a weightier way of being in and seeing the world. We lack the ability to answer if something is good or bad or easy or hard, because we now see that those things aren’t divided out places we reside in at one time, that all of these spots of gratitude and challenge, grief and joy exist in concentric, overlapping relationships. Eventually this more complicated thing can become a beautiful gift, taking something that was black and white and turning it prismatic, full technicolor. The gift of pain is in allowing us, from this fractured place, to let those broken things now act as facets that give us vantage points into depths of perspective that were inaccessible before. Pain offers us new lenses for living.

If you’ve never had the experience of a panic attack, it can feel impossible to imagine it fully. The out of control-ness, the fear that feels like it is coring something out of the center of you in a way that will stay unfillable, the embarrassment that you lack the mental fortitude to deal with what is happening in your mind and body, full out loss of control.

This most recent hospital trip was unexpected and unplanned. What started out as a manageable issue turned emergent, and parts of me that felt strong and stable quickly flipped upside down. I tried with intention to calm these waves of upset, drawing on what I knew as truth and the resources inside of me and around me to steady the shake. Even though there have been multiple surgeries and body frustrations these past few years, I haven’t felt this depth of fracture for over a decade. It felt as if a switch was flipped. After the necessary challenging medical procedures, when I knew my body was physically on the healing side of things, my brain still lived in the land of chaos. Waves of fear, full out panic, and even in the seemingly quiet moments, the buzz of anxiety hummed and pulsed its way through me without relent.

On one of my noisiest nights, I was still awake around 3am in a bit of a shame spiral, convincing myself I should be able to change out of this fear state as simply as taking off dirty clothes and putting on clean ones. I felt small, embarrassed, frustrated at my weakness and lack. In such a moment of mercy for my noisy mind, my heart landed on a story in the book of Luke about Jesus begging for the opportunity to bypass suffering. I don’t say this as a declarative theological statement, but in that moment I felt like Jesus knew what it was to have a panic attack.

In the gospels, the descriptors of that experience include: (AMP, ESV)

agony, sorrowful to death, troubled, fell on his face, weak, begged to remove this, sweat like great drops of blood, grieved, greatly distressed, deeply distressed and anguished, almost to the point of death, longed for support and asked his companions- could you not stay awake with me?

For anyone who has felt the depths of anxiety, this experience feels viscerally relatable. And in that moment at 3am in the swirling of my mental storm, there was a comfort in knowing I was seen and understood by the God of the panic attack. These words may bristle against what many hold to be true. They aren’t said in derision, and they aren’t meant to diminish. The physical and emotional manifestations of this moment in the life of the God of the universe detail a level of struggle that for those who have been or are in the place of unraveling, offer a solidarity beyond words. Most of us can’t manage to look at our own struggles, so the concept of seeing strength undergo crushing weakness is unpalatable. The words given to us don’t allow an easy path around the pain. Agony is not a splinter in a thumb, it is a depth of breaking open where the basic ability to function and manage life feel inconceivable. It is the desire for an eject button, a bypass route, a way out of the pressing and crushing. And when one doesn’t come, it is grief.

For all I don’t understand and can’t make sense of in scripture, for all that my small hands can’t hold, the concept of someone setting down full power and ability to never experience or taste suffering, and choosing to step into humanity in understanding and great love with people who are broken, is one of the greatest gifts of comfort I have known in this life. And in the middle of that night this truth scooped me up and carried me with such tenderness that I was not alone in my pain. I have found that to be the agent of greatest change in my life. Not shame or prodding or quippy encouragement, but someone stepping into the places I desperately want to bury with their presence and compassion.

I once had a pediatric nurse who, while wheeling me back for an endoscopy, explained that she had just undergone this same procedure without sedation so that she could better understand her patients. What do you think that moment did for my ten year old trembling heart? Did it decrease my respect and confidence in her? Of course not! It is a moment of connection so strong I still think about it decades later. She willingly stepped into suffering on my behalf, to offer me a moment of feeling less alone in my pain. What a stunning act of goodness to give another person.

The photo at the top of this post is from a glass art exhibit inside the hospital at University of Nebraska Medical Center. When granted off floor walking privileges, it is my very favorite place to visit while inpatient. A visible reminder of those overlapping spaces of holding goodness and beauty and deep pain in this same little human address of a body I’ve been given. And as much as we wish we could shortcut our suffering, aren’t these the moments that work in us so that we can come alongside others and live out that same grace, offering that same gentleness and space of understanding? Instinctually, we want to cover up and hide our deficits. We fear allowing others into the places in us where we don’t measure up and can’t keep up. But in these passages of scripture we are trusted with witnessing all power breaking open on our behalf, and in doing so we realize we have never before witnessed such true strength.

There is a zero percent plea for pity in any words or behind the curtain moments that I put out for public eyes. I usually attempt to talk myself out of this level of transparency because of the possibility that it would look like a sympathy hunt. Any time we open ourselves up in our most tender places, there is opportunity for assumption and misunderstanding. There is also the beautiful chance that in sharing these moments, it allows someone else who has been dunked in the deep end to take a much needed breath of solidarity. I write for the latter. It has happened enough times in my life that someone has seen the space I’m in, and shared their life with me in a way that connects me to hope, and allows me to keep moving through another day. Hoping as we hear each others stories and see in ourselves these broken open places, we can move forward in a way that brings understanding and healing. We are not alone in our pain.