Black Hole Beast

Doesn't everyone have a name for their freeze response?

On the RV trip - when we sold our house and half our stuff and took our kids around the US and Canada for 18 months - that’s when mornings began to feel like black holes I had to spend hours clawing my way out of. Not right away, but a few months in, and I’ve not been able to shake it still - 6 years later.

Most mornings since 2018 I’ve woken with a heavy dread pinning me to my bed. Somedays I can move the weight of the black hole off of me without exerting so much energy I want to collapse a few hours later, but that’s not the norm.

Somedays I can’t find a foothold on the slick dark walls, and the gravitational pull fights me all day. I may be able to rise from bed, but only if I bring the spinning black hole of dread with me, only if I carry it. It’s heavy.

When I explained this to a therapist in my outpatient program, she nodded and sighed, “Yeah, depression will do that.” I shook my head. “I don’t think this is depression? It feels like fear. It feels like I have to hide because I’m scared. Are you sure it’s not anxiety?”

Another member of the group chimed in, “Nah, my anxiety makes it to where I can’t stay in bed in the morning. Up at 5 am and working right away to make it stop.”

Fuck, I thought, why couldn’t I feel that instead? Why couldn’t getting up and doing things make the dread stop - not make it heavier?

Why couldn’t I at least have the kind of mental illness that makes me fucking productive?

I’ve not written much about the RV trip since we wrapped things up, and I think people have a lot of assumptions about it simply because of what I’ve not shared. No, it was not the reason I left my marriage. Yes, there were so many great moments I don’t regret. But also?

It broke me… or broke a piece of me. It contributed to my breaking. I was cracking long before it, though.

The confluence of my perfectionism-driven, emotionally dysregulated self with extreme external pressure but little reward left me swirling and stuck in increasing self-hatred. Perceived massive failures kept me there.

I committed before our launch to create 2 to 3 videos a week for a large YouTube channel that signed us. I knew it would be a huge amount of work, as the sole cameraman, producer, and editor, in addition to all the other things. But I was told that the hours would swiftly pay off and that we’d make good money from this effort.

After 5 months of viewing the majority of our trip through the lens of a camera, long and late hours editing videos in the truck on our way to the next destination, and desperately searching for wifi in national parks so I could upload episodes by our strict deadlines, we had netted less than $0.

I’d redirected all of my energy from my profitable blog- BabyRabies - to focus on this new endeavor, and 5 months in, all I had to show for that pivot was this beast that swallowed me whole and breathed words into me like, “You are such an idiot. What a complete waste. You really thought you could do this on your own? Be the breadwinner? You’ll never be able to hustle hard enough to live the life you want because you don’t deserve it. You’ve ruined everything.”

I set alarms on my phone for 7 am, labeled things like “Dreams don’t work unless you do.” Then, every morning, I’d lay paralyzed in bed, a magnet through my throat to my pillow, terror coursing through me, all the ways I was going to fuck up that day - as a businesswoman, as a mom, as a wife - playing out over and over on a loop.

And it felt like moving - like getting up and showing a sign of life - was dangerous. Like this black hole beast would breathe harder and louder, so I stayed there in bed. Quiet and still, but also clenching every muscle in my body for what felt like hours.

I wondered, maybe it’s the blackout shades? The bedroom in the RV was really comfortable. We managed to get our king-size Comforpedic mattress in it, the temperature was always perfect, and there were these incredible rolling shades on the windows that didn’t let in a speck of sunlight.

It makes sense that my brain would do best with some sunlight in the morning, so there was a week when I exerted a herculean effort to pull myself out of bed when that 7 am “hustle harder” alarm went off, with the promise that all I had to do was get to the couch, which sat in a bay of windows.

Still, in the light or the dark, the black hole whirred. I sat balled up in the corner of the couch, gripping my coffee mug so tight I thought it might crack… like I had.

I could not shift my brain from its freeze response.

The only way out of it wasn’t even really through it, it was just to give it time to melt to a manageable size that I could carry through the rest of the day.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to look at all of it from a distance, to connect dots with strings and make sense of why mornings became what they are and, I guess, may always be now. Why no matter how anxious (or excited!) I am to get something done, to tick off boxes on my to-do list, to make myself proud - most days the fight of my life is to simply not hate myself for the first few hours after I wake. A task so hard that when I succeed, I collapse in exhaustion by late afternoon.

While the RV trip, on its own, isn’t something I think brought my marriage to a close, this intimate battle with my freeze response - the black hole beast - probably is.

What I knew to be paralyzing appeared to be indifference from the outside. What I knew to be exhausting appeared to be lazy. What I knew to be terrifying appeared to be hysterical.

I thought eventually it would go away. I really hoped it would… I really hope it will.