Like a Snowball Rolling Downhill
For most of the nineties, I worked for Accenture, known then as Andersen Consulting. We referred to ourselves at the time as “androids.” Wish we had known enough to trademark that name back then. Anyway, for most of my eight-plus years at Accenture I traveled every week, and the last two years there I was traveling multiple times a week between multiple clients. This amounted to roughly a hundred and twenty flights per year, or just shy of a million miles in seven years. That is not a lot compared to some folks I know, but an enormous amount compared to the average individual who drives to and from work every day. The funny thing is that prior to leaving New England to take the job with Accenture in Chicago I really had not traveled or explored much. Then with Accenture, I got to work in dozens of countries, three or four of the continents, depending how you count, and some of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it was all expenses paid. Not a bad gig!!
At first, I was a bit worried about jumping in and traveling that much, but shortly after I got started it became second nature, and in fact, the United Airlines planes, and colors, felt like home to me. I trusted those guys with my life, literally, and being on a plane, flying from city to city, country to country, became so routine it was comforting.
I traveled so much during this time in my life that saying yes to rerouting a roundtrip from Zurich to San Francisco for a brief speaking engagement in order to visit a client in Brazil was no big deal. Nor was saying yes to popping over to London for a meeting with a client on a Monday morning that was requested on Thursday night. That meeting turned into a year working in Europe and the UK with about a week’s notice. At the time I found all of this fun, exciting, and just part of my life. I was in the habit of saying yes to things and making them work and never really had to deal with stress related to the gig. I just enjoyed what I was doing and the travel and the hours and the crazy schedule was not just a part of it, it was the exciting part of it to me.
After Accenture, I continued to consult on my own, and I also taught and coached on the East Coast and then the West, eventually settling in my new city, Boise. None of this seemed crazy or stressful to me, it all just seemed like one big adventure after another.
I tell you all of this as background for what has become my life today.
In all that travel, and moving, one huge life change after another, I had never actually had “anxiety,” at least not noticeably, until the COVID days, with one exception. I would fly out to a client site every week. I would typically fly out on Sunday afternoon or evening and come back on Friday afternoon. Occasionally I would have to fly out early morning on Monday and when this would occur, I would typically get picked up by my buddy Ron at four or four thirty in the morning. This is why I preferred Sunday nights. One Monday morning as we headed to the airport, I was feeling really strange. I was sweating, my chest felt tight, heavy, and I just felt warm all over. I had never felt anything like this before, and at this point in my life, I was in great shape, so I couldn’t believe it could be my heart, but just wasn’t sure. Just before turning left to get on the ramp to jump on the highway to head out of the city to the airport, I said “Hey, Ron, hold on a second.” Ron immediately pulled over and after sitting on the side of the road for a few minutes I had Ron take me back home. Once I put my bags back in the apartment, I WALKED myself to the hospital about a mile away, plus or minus. They immediately started to work on me and decided to keep me for a couple of days to run tests. They never said that it was a panic or anxiety attack, just that it was not cardiac-related. This was one of only two times in my eight years with the firm that I missed a flight. The other being when San Fransisco decided to move the rental cars off-site without prior notice.
The above was the one and only time I felt anything like this until September of 2021. I still have no real understanding of why I started having anxiety attacks, what triggered them, why at that time, I just know I am not a fan. There are lots of theories, such as possibly some sort of post-COVID thing, or some issue with medications the doc had me on/took me off, or perhaps falling out of my hammock and landing on the back of my head the summer prior, again. It is also possible, perhaps probable, that it was some combination of all three plus crazy changes at work, but ultimately the why does not change the fact that the anxiety appears to be here to stay, and at times is quite acute!!
I have seen doctors, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and spoken with many other people who have struggled with this horrible affliction, and the answer is that NO ONE has the answer as to why, or what is causing this. The only reason the “why” matters to me is that I am, and always have been, an analytic. I HAVE to know why!! One brief anecdote to prove this, when I was seven years old I took a small sledgehammer and a chisel and hit the seem of a can of black spray paint as hard as I could because I wanted to see what was inside. Fortunately, I was only blinded for a short period of time. And I somehow managed to climb up the thirty-two steps to the house, through the entryway, into the kitchen, and then up onto the kitchen counter to the phone, and dialed my mother’s office by feel, on a rotary phone, all the while covered from head to toe in black paint. I have just always needed to know the why, and not knowing why this is now a thing with me definitely adds to it.
Anyway, when this first started in September of 2021 it was suddenly difficult for me to get out of bed, go outside, go for my run, get to work. I was waking up with this overwhelming feeling of dread, of fear, of not wanting to leave the comfort of my bed, covers, room in the back of the house. I would try to simply go out back to sit on the patio to work on my laptop and I wouldn’t be able to do so. When I tried the feelings would intensify. The tingly, crawling feeling would intensify as I tried to venture out, even just into the kitchen. For the first two weeks, I would wake up, reach over to the nightstand, grab my laptop, turn it on, and begin to work. I would spend all day working from the moderate comfort of my bed, only venturing out to use the latrine or occasionally find food. As the month progressed, and then further into the fall, the intensity began to fade some and eventually, I was able to venture out to the patio to sit at my workbench with the laptop, but routinely I would begin to feel my skin start to crawl again and I would have to go back inside.
The running, although it is not anywhere near the intensity or distance of yesteryear, would help push the feelings away briefly. Getting outside, when able, also helped, and interactions with those close to me that I could trust helped. Although the doctors had no answers, and I have made a personal choice to not go back on medication because of the issues that seemed to kickstart all of this in the first place, seeing a counselor, exercising, and being open with those around me helped get me back to somewhat “normal.” Not really sure what that word means, but anyway.
The anxiety, and depression, have been there since the fall of 2021, but in a much more manageable way except every so often it comes back with a vengeance, which it did at the beginning of last week. I don’t really know what kicked it off. It truly could be just about anything, and again, when this is happening the why really does not matter. I know one thing that seemed to make it worse is that I attempted to take Monday off almost completely. Since I work for myself, I don’t really ever have days off or ever stop at least thinking or planning, sometimes thinking about what I’m going to write next, chewing on it so to speak, or thinking about the next steps with a client, connections I need to reach out to, or leads to follow-up on. So, when I do try to take a day off it tends to backfire on me, and last Monday, given that the anxiety was coming back it just seemed to make matters worse.
As the week went on each day was a little bit worse than the day before. If you think for a moment about the title of this piece, “Like a Snowball Rolling Downhill,” please try to imagine that you are inside the snowball as it rolls down the hill gaining speed, snow, and size as it rolls. If you ever found yourself stuck in a pile of powder after a fall while skiing, snowboarding, hiking, snowshoeing, etc., you can hopefully understand what I am getting at. As the snowball rolls down this hill with you inside, the weight of the snow around you continues to build, and by the time you reach the bottom of the hill, and either run out in the flat at the bottom, or worse, and more likely, get stopped by/in the snowbank at the bottom of the hill just before reaching the parking lot, you can imagine just how much snow and weight and cold is now wrapped around you and thus how nearly impossible it is to move, and/or to extricate yourself from the snowball, and snowbank, you are now buried in/beneath. And yes, as I wrote this paragraph my chest began to tighten, and I began to get a bit lightheaded. Welcome to severe anxiety and a bit of what it is to not just be in the throes of a full-blown anxiety attack, but to try and work your way out.
As with everything else I have written about in the mental health space, it is critically important that you speak with those around you about what you are dealing with, feeling, as it relates to your anxiety, be it somewhat mild, occasionally a bit more than mild, or entirely debilitating. No one needs to go through these feelings alone, and although speaking with others and letting them know what you are going through won’t make the feelings go away, sorry, it does help to simply know others are aware of what you are attempting to deal with and manage. People can also be a welcome distraction and can perhaps even be a means to an end in terms of getting ourselves to slowly work our way out of our surroundings to socialize with those around us. It is not easy to venture out and sometimes, as I described above, it can be downright scary, but it is also important to at least keep trying to push ourselves to go out and do more.
I am hoping that some of what is here helps you or someone you care about. Please share and discuss and continue to reach out.
