Reactivity and Reawakening

Summer was a dream. Attending, traveling, dancing, loving, rewilding. I felt like I met everything with a resounding roar of FUCKKKK YESSSSS. The heat brought about energy, laziness, creation, destruction, fun.

I loved it all. And I’m tired.

Last year in September I made a goal for myself to let go of anger. And the year before that. It seems like every year there’s a residual energy that lingers from all the passion that courses through me during summer, the most celebratory season for this fixed fire sign. And part of the beauty of passion is that all emotions come to the forefront, including pain, including anger, signaling to us that whatever is unresolved is just simmering beneath the surface. Maybe it’s like some kind of volcanic cleansing; the pressure of the year and everything that was tucked away was just lying dormant until through movement and agitation and connection it’s stimulated enough to rouse and ask for confrontation.

I’ve been noticing my reactivity lately, specifically the things that cause reactivity in my body, in my thoughts, in my words. It all happens so fast. And when I’m not conscious of it, that body to thought to word reaction is instantaneous. What happens in my body and thoughts is private. What escapes from my body as form of words is not. Once it’s sent out into the world, I can’t take it back. And I feel of late I spend many moments questioning what exactly happened there. Why is this still bothering me? Why am I so bothered? Why did I react that way? What is this trying to tell me?

I’m so reactive on the phone. Every time my phone rings I have a Pavlovian response of tensing up and resenting whoever is on the other side of that call. If I can trace back to when this started happening it was during the first year of working in construction. The culture shock of transitioning from a cushy, uneventful, unimaginative office job to the overstimulating, chaotic, and demanding environment of construction was jarring to the nervous system, to say the least. Phone calls usually meant headaches, stress, time-sensitive problems, and no one’s being that nice to you while they’re telling you want they need. While all my conditioning as a woman was always be nice and pleasant and people-pleasing. So needless to say, I had both a lot of learning and unlearning to do. I’ve gotten a lot better at specifically keeping myself calm and non-reactive when at work, because that’s just the job. But yeah, every time that phone rings when I’m off site, I’ve come to expect a problem. I curse under my breath. And just having this conditioned response is exhausting. When it’s a nice phone call, e.g. Noah calling to ask if I’d like a snack on his way home, it’s met with furtiveness, wariness, my defenses are still up because that phone ring immediately caused about 65 walls to go up around my heart. So what is actually a very tired and depleted voice is mistaken for lack of appreciation or a general grouchy mood. It sucks. I don’t want to make my loved ones feel that. I want them to feel loved and amazing and appreciated and celebrated for every ounce of awesome that they are. So it’s something I gotta work on.

Reactivity is something that I learned about only after adopting Lady nine years ago. Every time we’d see another dog she’d completely lose her shit. Her past life was in Mexico in a dog-fighting ring. We finally found a trainer who only used positive-reinforcement methods and that’s when we saw a change in her behaviour. Our trainer told us that in order to mitigate the strong negative association Lady had with other dogs, we had to rewire her nervous system to think dogs equated to positive things. She asked us what Lady’s favorite things were. The answer was simple, and not too far from my own: Noah and food. So every time we saw a dog, Noah and I would yell “YAAAY!!!” in a high-pitched voice (Noah’s was especially enthusiastic. The other dog moms at training sessions loved him lol) and give her tons of tuna fudge (as Noah so elegantly put it, “It’s like crack for dogs.”). At first, this method seemed insane. Like you just gotta picture Noah dancing around distracting our super stressed out 100-pound dog while I’m fumbling for treats as fast as my clumsy panicked fingers could possibly fumble, “here have treats look at me don’t look at them LOOK AT ME!!! FUDGE!!!”

The insanity worked. After years of counter-conditioning, Lady pretty much gives no shits. Like maybe 1 out of 100 times she’ll half-heartedly do a slow-charge and mumble growl, forget the purpose of her effort, and just sit down and wait for tuna fudge (Noah has said that from now on whenever my phone rings I just gotta yell “FUCKING YASSSSS!!!!” or imagine him chirping “YAAY!” and dancing around like a drunk goblin throwing Halloween candy and 5 dollar bills at me).

I used to think reactivity was aggression, but I now see that while there is a correlation it’s not really the same thing. I guess when I think of aggression, I see it as a choice. And certainly studies have shown that it can be, particularly when it comes to offensive aggression, as during moments of fear, offensive aggression usually lessens. But defensive aggression is usually a reaction. A reaction based in fear. And in the presence of fear the aggression actually escalates. When Lady was reacting to other dogs, it wasn’t really because she wanted to kill them. She just thought that they were coming to kill her.

In the last five years, working closely with my dad has brought about its joys and challenges. My parents and I also survived some trauma during this period and things are still rocky some days for me. Sometimes I don’t feel safe with them. Like I still need to protect my heart from them. And I hear the reactivity in my thoughts and words and I feel it in my body when certain topics are brought up, when I think a conversation is going to go a certain direction. And it sucks. Because I thought I dealt with this two Septembers ago, and last September, and here it is again to greet me. So again, I’m here to work on letting some stuff go. And I know that it’s a cycle that will repeat itself until it’s really fully healed. And it will take time and intention. And that’s okay. Because if I were to look at myself now from two years ago, I do feel a lot better. It’s easier to be honest with myself. It’s easier to call my own bullshit. There’s no one to blame for my reactivity. And the only person who can do anything about it is me.

So after putting my relationship with myself on pause for a bit - in lieu of lots of teaching this summer (actual full fuck yessss) and a lot of socializing, I’m ready to gently awaken to the present. When I’m going out a lot I don’t have the energy to write, to think. The focus turns to pleasure, and the thing with pleasure is, it can’t last. So then it becomes a chase for something that becomes increasingly scarcer, as the dopaminergic cycles in my brain start to go wtf Vera chill the fuck out. As Albert Camus said, “There is nothing frenzied about debauchery, contrary to what is thought. It is but a long sleep.” Having the time to return to practice has been heavenly. Walking the dogs in the morning to the cooler air has been divine. The air smells like a fresh apple - like that space between the peel and the flesh, slightly green, florally, grassily juicy. Imagining microscopic fairies, painting the leaves every night, so that when we wake up, just a little more progress has been made in the change from green to orange/red/yellow. Feeling the changes in the light - how it’s gone from summer hay yellow to autumn burnt orange. The earlier, cozier, grey-purple dusk. The way Lady’s movements slow, her eyes more concentrated with love, like aged honey. Noticing that I’m calmer when I schedule more time for myself, just to be. And that there’s no really right or wrong way. It’s enough just to do what feels right now, and to continuously ask myself if this is the person I want to be, if this is how I want to live. And if it isn’t, to take that time to recalibrate what would feel better. To see reactivity as a symptom, not a trait. To feel grateful for each opportunity life has given me to reawaken to what’s good. To know the privilege of witnessing another change in seasons, another change in ourselves. To welcome it, revel in it, slither around in it like fresh bedsheets, and feel how comforted the body is when we can relax into it.

The other day when I was on a phone call with my dad, I had a big reaction. After getting off the phone, I felt confused by my own violence. I don’t even think he noticed, because the words weren’t as bad as the panic and rage that had started to percolate inside. Our phone call had been cut short, thankfully. But I really had to face what had left such bitterness. I felt it in my jaw, in my chest. My hands. And then I realized my body was reacting to a memory. There was nothing in the present moment that was actually threatening. There was no pain. That’s when I realized, maybe the opposite of reactivity isn’t calmness, but the conscious decision to relax. To notice when our adrenal glands have fired and to let the mind know it’s okay. Whatever comes next, we can handle it. And the more relaxed we are, the better we’ll be at handling it. So I took a breath, and went to work.