A Message to My Nervous System

from the god of mischief

Issue #57/Good and Beautiful Things

I never really expected to get life advice from Loki, the god of mischief, or even the actor who plays Loki in the Marvel movies. I turned on the podcast interview with actor Tom Hiddleston about a week ago not because I’m a Loki fan (my kids are) but because I find interviews with Hiddleston to be thoughtful and intelligent and I needed something to listen to on my bike ride.

Finding green fields and blue skies on my bike ride.

In addition to some light entertainment, I thought I might find a few gems of advice for the students in the theater class I’ll be teaching this Fall. The interview did prove to be interesting and I occasionally stopped my bike to jot down some quotes in my Notes app.

One particular phrase lingered long past the bike ride and it turned out to be a message for my nervous system instead of for my future students. It was a reminder Hiddleston often gives himself and others right before they start shooting a scene.

///

Do you remember the alert system that was set up after 9/11? Every day we would get an update on the color of the alert, a constant reminder of how high the threat was to our country.

Yellow meant “significant risk”, orange meant “high risk” and red meant “severe risk”. At the time I was a mother of a young baby, an already high-alert mom who didn’t know how to handle the unknowns of the future under the new threat levels. And the warning system had its limitations. The country remained at “elevated risk” for three years. I know I wasn’t the only one who found it difficult to sustain that level of concern for one thousand and ninety-five days.

Six years ago I figured out that my nervous system had been operating like the post 9/11 alerts, sending out active threat warnings twenty-four hours a day for most of my life. I think my nervous system, we’ll call him Bob for short, learned at a young age to view me like a little baby who needed protecting and he took his job very seriously. It seemed like we were stuck on “high alert” for four decades.

I was forty years old when I became aware of the problem, an age when it was definitely past the time for our relationship to mature. I was no longer an infant who needed a bodyguard vigilantly watching out for me. But Bob was excellent at his job, so much so that he got stuck in a rut. Anytime we approached things in life that had previously caused pain, Bob would send out warnings that usually showed up as a web of tangled, painful memories. Along with the memories, he would come up with every awful scenario that could happen this time around until I was pretty much frantic with fear.

///

When I heard the podcast with Tom Hiddleston, aka Loki, we were about a week and a half out from our daughter’s heart procedure. This daughter, our second born, is twenty-one years old, only a few years younger than I was when I gave birth to her. When she was born we found out quickly that her two main arteries were backwards, a set-up that didn’t work as a useful plumbing system to circulate blood throughout the body. At four days old she underwent open heart surgery.

My nervous system, aka Bob, had already learned that the world wasn’t safe but those hours that we spent waiting to find out if our daughter would live through the surgery brought Bob to the highest alert system available. We were in code red. Our daughter went through another open heart surgery about a year later and then another unexpected procedure to place a stent in her heart when she was fifteen. The surprise of the procedure, after so many quieter years of her health, thrust us into code red all over again.

///

“This has never happened before,” Hiddleston tells himself and the crew around him before the cameras start rolling for the final scene of the Loki television series.

As an actor, he’s reminding himself to go into the scene fresh, to remember that his character has never experienced what’s about to happen. If he can tap into that truth, he can react and say his lines as if it’s all happening for the first time, as if he doesn’t know the ending.

For six years now I’ve been telling Bob something similar. Yes, Bob, we’ve been in situations like this before but that doesn’t mean we know what’s going to happen. It doesn’t mean it will be as hard as that first time we watched our infant rolled away on a gurney. It doesn’t mean it will feel like it did when the cardiologist showed us a video of them placing a stent into her beating heart.

What I don’t say is that it will all be okay because there’s no way for me to know that. I don’t know about you but I’ve never had any success at lying to my nervous system. The only thing I knew going into the procedure this past week was that this had never happened before in exactly the same way. My husband and I and our daughter were older, our life experience was different, and the medical team and technology were different, too. This wasn’t just a repeat of the past and we weren’t necessarily walking into a worse-case scenario.

///

Truthfully, for the last few years it’s been more like Bob is the baby and I’m taking care of him. Speaking soothing words to him when he’s frightened and letting him learn to lean on me.

This week Hiddleston’s phrase helped me but it didn’t keep the pain or fear completely at bay. My sight flickered between my infant daughter on the gurney and the fully grown young woman who signed her own consent forms and talked to the nurse about her senior thesis for college. But it did allow me to hold space for a different experience and outcome.

A cyanotype I made last week.

///

Maybe you’re headed somewhere difficult, somewhere you feel like you’ve already been before. Maybe your nervous system is trying to tell you that it already knows the ending. You’re going to your next ultrasound after the previous one where you found out difficult news, or you’re visiting a family member who’s hurt you all your life, or you’re starting a new relationship (friendship or romantic) and you need to believe this time might be different.

May you remember what the god of mischief said, “This has never happened before.”
This is a new part of the story. And just maybe, it has a different ending. And if it doesn’t, maybe you and your nervous system have grown enough to handle whatever comes next.

Note: The procedure was successful and so far the recovery has gone well, too. You can read another post about the birth of our daughter here.

---

---

Life Goes On

Even with big things going on, there’s been lots of little moments, too.
(a cypress tree draped in Spanish moss on a quick trip to Florida, a sunset in Florida, our daughter’s cats—I promise they did not pose them that way!)

---

From the Sketchbook

I found the two faces along with the paper scraps in my stash of collage materials/old art and used them to inspire these two pieces.

---

Blessings from the Guest Nest,

-Aimee

P.S.—Thanks so much for reading, sharing, and contributing to the conversation. You can support my art and writing by donating to my art supply fund and by sharing this newsletter with friends who might enjoy it.

---