THE NARRATIVE ARC

How Living In a Time of Chaos Creates Stressful Anticipation

Most people don’t notice the pressure of this inner conflict

Photo by Peter Bryan on Unsplash

Five people are waiting…

A woman is waiting to hear back from a friend she sent an urgent message to seven hours ago. They live several time zones apart, so she’s trying not to think the worst when it stretches to ten hours with no reply.

A man is waiting to hear whether he has a job prospect in May after he was laid off in February. He’s been telling himself to live one day at a time for nearly 100 days.

Another man is anxious for an opportunity to talk with his wife after he had a meltdown at work. Their children are busy after school with many demands on their time.

A woman is concerned. Something has shifted in her relationship with a loved relative. It’s nothing she can pinpoint, but she knows he’s tense and tight-lipped. Her body reads the signs before anything has been said aloud.

Another woman is checking her blood pressure three times per day and has discontinued her blood thinner medication a week in advance of a biopsy of her kidneys. They have only been functioning at 30% of optimal functioning.

They are each living under the pressure of what is becoming. If they must embrace chaos in some fashion, the pressure begins to show by affecting sleep, appetite, concentration, mood, and the tone of the day ahead.

It’s like that cliché line people use to begin stories: “It was a dark and stormy night…” In this case, it feels like they’re living on a dark and stormy night, even though it’s noon and sunny. Each person tells themselves they’re just watching out and waiting — when nothing has happened yet.

But real life is more pragmatic, and the stories of the two women below have more twists and turns.

Consider Bonnie’s Testing

My friend, Bonnie, was worried because her test results after getting her most recent cancer screen showed some new anomalies that meant she had to have a biopsy of her left breast. Her mind kept jumping ahead, predicting that the worst outcome would mean another round of chemotherapy.

Normally, Bonnie’s ability to look ahead and assess the odds helped her take the best traffic route to work or catch the midweek sales at the grocery store, rather than getting the picked-over produce at the end of the week. But now the future seemed ominous, and every time Bonnie considered the cancer cells growing out of control, they seemed to overwhelm her possibilities of being healthy and happy.

Bonnie’s body was tracking her emotional weather and possible threat with her mood swings. Inside, her reading on her own body created tightness, nausea, restlessness, and an uncertainty about what was happening within her own skin. There was no logical reason that could help her deny the threat she felt. In her memory of her past experiences with cancer, she knew everything was on the line.

Rumination seemed to happen in Bonnie’s sleep. Subconsciously, she kept returning to the same existential questions. Her brain couldn’t outthink the threat the cancer cells posed. There is no certainty of a solution available to her. She had no way to put the proper answer on the other side of the equal sign. Bonnie only had to wait.

When I spoke with her, she often looked and sounded composed — working, parenting, and dealing with the daily grind — but she admitted that her body is always ready to leap up and run away from the threat.

When her doctor first told her the results, she found herself unable to concentrate on or process them. Bonnie was only ready to hear one thing: the test results show no sign of any living cancer cells. But that result hasn’t come yet. That conversation is still pending, and as long as it remains so, Bonnie feels disconnected from the essential enjoyment of being alive.

Anticipation has prepared Bonnie for action, but she has never been able to finish any action and complete her readiness cycle. Her danger is not concrete. She has no response until relief arrives as a clear test result. Internally, she’s mobilized without any form of release.

What is there to fight, withdraw from, or mourn? How can she decide, celebrate, or reorganize her life to live cancer-free? Her energy is consumed by anticipation of a future with no defined shape. Bonnie’s body is responding to the future of cancer in her life, but she has never known how it slunk uninvited in the back door.

Humans suffer from our wishing

We suffer not only from events themselves, but from the meaning, objects, wishes, fears and fantasies that are attached to those events. Like a bride anticipating her wedding day, it exists powerfully in her inner world before the vows have even been exchanged.

The feeling is already real, but nobody has said, “I do.” There is a period when attachment or independence, joy or disappointment, a sense of completion or an unexpected loss all hover between the couple. So much so that the bride may feel real fear until no one mentions any reason that they should not be married. The ceremony continues, and the vows are exchanged.

Recognizing this feeling makes people become harsh and impatient with themselves. They don’t understand their anxiety. This desire to be attached can feel like an urge to possess more. They want to avoid facing their fear that the other person may reject them.

The truth is, living through the wedding will only happen in the fullness of time. If they accept the full range of feelings as part of the experience, they won’t be tempted to repress or reject any of them out of hand. Often, all of the pre-wedding jitters get resolved once the ceremony takes place. Most people at the event don’t see this inner distress from the outside.

Never carefree

I’m the woman in the fifth example I introduced at the beginning of this article. Like Bonnie, I have a large number of medical tests because they’re needed to manage my chronic heart disease. I go for regular blood tests and have to keep my blood thinners at an acceptable level. Urine tests are taken regularly, and last fall, my kidney function began to decline appreciably.

In several tests since then, it has been shown that my kidneys are functioning at only 30 percent of the optimal level. So the specialist is sending me for a biopsy of my kidneys in mid-July.

Each medical procedure causes me to anticipate further medical constraints on my chronic heart condition. I end up living in a heightened state of readiness for the other shoe to fall. This is an inevitable cost of living with a chronic medical condition that people rarely talk about. There is the daily wear and tear of being chronically ill, but not sick enough to need hospital care.

However, I have an invisible illness and am never carefree. I’m living in a state of prolonged anticipation of the worst being about to happen. My mind and body are always trying to sidestep the future I dread will take form.

There’s a need to admit this reality and make space for the natural rhythm that comes as I anticipate events that have not taken place yet. Ultimately, the event I feel approaching is my own death.

Accepting that I don’t have answers to all of my questions is the best way to quell my distress. Then, when I get the results back, there is a sense of winning when I find a good result. But it’s always followed by the hollow letdown of knowing that I don’t know when the next test result may send me for more medical procedures.

Over the last decade, I’ve become accustomed to this situation, which is both a win and a loss, occurring at least three times per year.

Unfortunately, one day my test results will come back with an answer that shows I have lost and my illness has taken a new turn for the worse. There is an anticipation of this inevitable reality always hanging there. I know I won’t get out of this life alive.

But until I get that result, I choose to be like the bride in love with life and eager to enjoy each day as it comes. I just built in a bit more room for cloud watching and wool-gathering while keeping busy being creative.