High Agency Human

Chapter 9

 High Agency Human

 Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

 —Jawaharlal Nehru

“It’s good to see you never lost your courage.”

The handwritten words and signature stare back at me from the piece of paper in my hands. It was torn from a notepad, the kind you tuck into a shirt pocket; the paper is crisp and the ink vivid. It could have been written yesterday. But these words, this signature—it just couldn’t be.

I toss around the few old letters and mementos in the fire safe, looking for more evidence. Nothing. Nothing else from this time or person. Just this note.

Its writer, Matt, is a good friend, a solid man known for his kindness. His note is an apology for not staying more closely connected over the years, and to say that even though we haven’t been in touch, he’s been cheering me on from a distance. This is what brotherhood in the military, and in life, means to me. We’re not always close, but there for each other to weather hard times or celebrate success.

Matt was passing though base while we were both deployed in Afghanistan and left the note on my bunk. We missed seeing each other in person, and on the next deployment, he died.

That was twenty years ago.

His words were found and resonated today.

Because I have, in fact, lost my courage.

At least that’s what this feels like. A defeat. A giving in. A cowardly acceptance. I was sick with a virus a few months ago and it began instantly—relentless and debilitating waves of anxiety attacks, two or three a day. The nausea, perhaps the thing I loathe most, lasts four to six hours with each attack. Then there are the darker thoughts that seem real even when I know they are not. It feels like a weighted blanket is wrapped around my mind and the smallest of missteps, like eating or stress, sets off the next wave of misery. Wave upon wave upon wave. I fear it. I’ve given in to it. I’m in the middle of an anxiety attack right now. There’s no rhyme or reason behind it, it’s just here. Sorting through my things was meant as a distraction, and then I found the note.

The coolness of the hardwood floor in my apartment feels good, a momentary sense of relief. I look at Matt’s words, then at my military medals and my grandmother’s pearls, also in the safe: all reminders of agency, capability, and grit. Matt always made life happen, the medals are symbols of my own ability to live big, and my grandmother, well, she was the very definition of grit. Another wave of nausea is incoming and the heat rises up through my body. I want to turtle and ignore the world until it goes away, but I think my incredibly wise friend Lynne was right yesterday when she matter-of-factly stated that I might be the main contributor to this purgatorial state.

I want to be the person Matt knew. The one with courage, and a lot of gumption. And if I want to be that person, I have to be that person.

It’s time to get up off the floor and get to work.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told that experiencing anxiety attacks will be a lifelong struggle, something to accept, something unchangeable, by friends, colleagues, and doctors alike. And maybe that’s what they know, the experience they’ve had. But I know and you know that when we operate as High Agency Humans, most things are changeable or, at minimum, within our grasp to influence in our favor. We have an influencing role in our outcomes and the agency to switch gears when we need to. Anxiety attacks are not a label nor an identity, but an experience to move through. This is simply the next obstacle in this season’s hero’s journey in a life full of hero’s journeys.

In the few months after I discovered Matt’s note, it took applying everything I knew—everything you now know too—to create change. I immediately pulled the emergency brake with a reduction in almost all areas. I left my nursing job on good terms. Some thought I was crazy to leave a relatively new job, but it didn’t matter. I knew that I needed to pull back to move forward. Thankfully, I had used the good times before this to prepare for the hard times and created a financial buffer I could lean on while figuring out my health. I stopped writing, stopped socializing, and started eating simple meals. I slept a lot. Life was reduced to only the absolute necessities.

During the next three months, I stayed in that reduced state while trying to understand not only what I was going through, but how exactly to move through it. I gladly accepted help from medical professionals and leaned on family and friends, sleeping over on nights when I wasn’t feeling the best. Breathing exercises, meditation, hours of playing simple online games—I did anything I could to create a steadier state of being and a little space to work on myself. When that space came, when the anxiety attacks went from a few daily to every few days, I was able to push forward. Instead of being driven by anxiety, I switched off autopilot by speaking to others with similar experiences, and doctors, therapists, and neurosurgeons, gathering as much insight on how the brain works and coping mechanisms as possible. I consumed articles, books, and podcasts on neurology, psychology, and metabolic health, and then applied that knowledge, testing out what worked and didn’t work for me. I pursued peak conditioning through visualization at night and exercising my stress threshold during the day. This meant doing what I didn’t feel like doing but knew was good for me, like social gatherings, exercise, and going outside, in small doses that I gradually increased. I started purposely increasing my heart rate by walking fast, then focused on keeping my mind calm. My conscious, intentional, and persistent efforts mirrored different aspects of this book. Nothing was linear, and these efforts often overlapped.

There were some wins and a lot of trip-ups, but after another few months, the recovery scores on my health tracker started to improve and I began to feel better. I could handle more stress again without falling into a pit of nausea.

I took the next nursing contract, one that demanded sixteen-hour shifts with a large serving of stress. And it was fine. I mean, it wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had, but it was fine. I was fine.

I have experienced only a few, exponentially milder anxiety attacks since.

Of course, not having an attack isn’t the point. As you’ve learned, we’re not here to stop hard times, but to increase our ability to weather them and prevent them from getting worse. That’s the win.