The Alligator
On learning to trust yourself
I just want to relax.
Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing right now? On this two-week, creative retreat?
And yet, I’ve barely slept a wink. Either I toss and turn and fall asleep after midnight, or I wake up in the wee hours of the morning and can’t go back to sleep.
What’s wrong with me?
But I don’t even know why I pose the question. I already know the answer.
~
Hypervigilant. It’s a term coined by psychologists to describe people who have a heightened sense of awareness, an overactive nervous system, often causing them to sense danger where it doesn’t actually exist.
It’s a trauma response—a way to cope with childhood traumas as mild as moody parenting and as severe as abuse. Us hypervigilants pick up on everything. Small changes in body language. Minute differences in word choice or tone. Anything minuscule that seems off.
We’re trying desperately to protect ourselves, to avoid the pain of abandonment and betrayal by predicting it. By closing ourselves off before we potentially get hurt.
As we start to heal, we recognize it. I daresay the hypervigilance lasts a lifetime, but we can learn to see it as such. An overreaction. A false suspicion of danger. An untrustworthy, gut reaction that we learn to quell and dismiss.
And let me tell you: It’s fucking annoying. Debilitating, really.
The slightest of triggers can put your entire body on red alert, and it can take hours or even days before you’re able to fully calm down and get it under control. Add an actual crisis to the mix—or even worse, a loving and devoted partner who becomes exhausted by your constant pushing away, questioning, and trust-tests—and, well, it can feel like you’re free-falling on the edge of a knife.
So back to this week. I want to relax. I want to sleep. I want to rest. But I know why I’m struggling.
I’d blame it on my overactive brain (and I did, until yesterday), but what I’m noticing is… maybe there’s more to the story.
Yesterday morning, I drove from my retreat location in small-town South Carolina to a wildlife refuge about an hour away. I had been to the same refuge two days before, where I painted under the peace and quiet of a grove of mossy oak trees while my new photographer friend wandered the trails on the property.
One of the trails led to a marsh, she said, and she thought I’d enjoy seeing it. So two days later, craving the same peace and quiet that I had felt under the oaks, I went back. This time, by myself.
And wouldn’t you know, from almost the minute I stepped onto the property, my brain did what it does. I start walking the “pond loop,” like my friend had suggested, and I can tell I am on high alert. Eyes darting sideways. Jumping at every rustle of the grass. I can’t even enjoy the beauty in front of me because I’m so anxious and on edge.
I get annoyed, angry. Here you go again.
Why are you like this?
Can’t you just stop?
I continue the loop, leaving the openness of the marsh and return towards the trees. I’ve done what I know to do—deep breathing, challenging the dangerous narrative playing through my mind, telling myself that I am safe—and these practices bring me down ever-so-slightly. I’ve gone from maybe a 9 to a 7.
I’m bebopping along, my mind likely wandering and ruminating on recent events as I leisurely make my way back to my peaceful oak grove.
And then, I gasp. Out of my peripheral vision to my left, I see a massive, dark gray, scaly blob. It’s an alligator of movies, eyeing me in his own periphery. He’s maybe 15 feet away and down from the small embankment where I’m standing.
In rehashed stories since then, I’ve said he could have been 20 feet long. I think that’s probably an exaggeration—I was too frightened to get a photo to prove it—but I can say with certainty that he was at least two feet wide and the length of a small room. He was heavy. Girthy. Menacing. And he most certainly could have snapped me in half.
How I remained so calm in the face of such real and present danger, I don’t know. Already upon him, I calmly and slowly kept going. And once I felt a safe distance away, I ran. Somehow, I was still able to paint beneath the oaks after. Compartmentalization, I suppose.
By the time I got back to my retreat locale, I was angry. I’m supposed to be relaxing. Why the fuck am I seeing gators?!
And this is the story I kept telling myself all afternoon. That I’m hypervigilant. That I’m angry for allowing shit like this to get to me when I’m supposed to be relaxing and having a grand ol’ time.
I recap the story at dinner with my fellow artists-in-residence, and my new poet friend says something that changes everything.
The gator was the universe playing a joke on me.
I think I’m supposed to relax, but what if it’s the opposite? What if my nervous system won’t relax right now because it needs to feel the anger, the frustration, the fear?
What if, like with the pond and the gator, I shouldn’t relax?
What if my mind and body actually know what they’re doing?
What if (like another friend had said to me earlier this week) the message is that I can trust myself?
Like how I’ve known and sensed danger brewing for years, but instead of believing myself, I chalked it up to my hypervigilance and believed the lies that others told me?
What if I’m no longer hypervigilant, but adequately vigilant? What if I’m healed?
I know me and my patterns. But I also know that mostly, I’m calm. And anytime I’ve sensed danger recently, I’ve been right. The danger has been there, almost exactly as I’ve sensed. Despite my self-imposed doubt. Despite what others have insisted is true.
Have I, in fact, been gaslighted? Have I been gaslighting myself?
Yesterday, I was angry. Today, I’m grateful. Mostly for the alligator who showed me that what I thought was an alligator, was, in fact, an alligator all along.
