WHEN “GO WITH YOUR GUT” IS BAD ADVICE
I suffer from a generalized anxiety disorder. It took a long time for me to call it that. Before I had a diagnosis, I had my family’s opinions. Dominique worries too much. She just needs to chill out. She stresses herself out over nothing. My fellow sufferers know it’s not so simple. We know the weight of worst case scenarios swarming through the hive of our anxious minds, that it feels like our chests are being crushed beneath it, how it penetrates everything.
The other afternoon, I was plucking stray hairs before a BBQ while my husband drove. I told him that I felt a pang of insecurity that he could slam on the brakes and the tweezers would lodge in my carotid artery causing me an untimely death. We laughed at the Final Destination quality of my fears. I arrived at the cook out hairy. I couldn’t pick the tweezers back up. When we are eating dinner at night, having a conversation about anything mildly important, I get airy-headed, dizzy, sensitive to sound. Then, I get angry. I become so on edge and frustrated in my inability to navigate why, that I lash out at the sound of him chewing. I did the same to my mother before I moved out. I got angry at my brother’s noisy breathing. The thinking part of me knows that I am being unreasonable, but my entire body reacts to the cortisol alarm bells ringing that I am in danger, that I am doomed, that the worst is yet to come. I unrelentingly try to shut these alarms down, but I only ever manage to hit the snooze button– they come back blaring in due time.
Everyone knows the common notion of advice columns, inspirational dramas, and the girlfriend get together tribunal trope: Go with your gut. The other night at around 2am I realized that my left breast was red. I breastfeed, my son does a lot of pinching, Hulk gripping, pulling, and he’s teething. He loves the left breast so much that it’s two cup sizes larger than the right (I’ve nicknamed them Biggie and Smalls respectively). It made perfect sense that my left boob was red. Not satisfied with the logical explanation, I consulted Dr. Google about it. After scrolling quickly past the articles on how breastfeeding reduces the risk of breast cancer, I came to the conclusion that I had developed a rare case of inflammatory breast cancer. I started to panic. I imagined not being there to see my son grow up. I imagined him not knowing how much I love him, carrying the weight of his motherlessness. I found myself consumed in essay by a woman who developed breast cancer while breastfeeding and read with pure terror her advice:
Go with your gut. If your body is telling you that something is wrong, listen to it. Don’t write it off.
I understand the merit in this for a person with a normal gut. But for a gut that still checks the closet for serial killers before going to bed, this advice is a death sentence. I thought, “Well, that’s it for me. My gut definitely senses that something is wrong. This is what the end feels like.”
That wasn’t the first time I believed I was going to die. The first was reading a Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul story when I was ten. I diagnosed myself with Leukemia because I had bruises on my legs like the boy in the story. Mostly I was just clumsy. But the second most recent incident was a year ago. My husband and I were sitting on the couch watching a movie and the panic came over me like a wave. He noticed me repeatedly checking my pulse and asked what was wrong. “I’m fine,” I said, afraid that if I said how I felt out loud it would become more real. I took a shower. Every time I blinked and the bathroom went black I was certain that the room would stay black and I would be dead. I got in bed, I hyperventilated, my chest began to ache. I paid another compulsive visit to the good Dr. Google and typed in the phrase “anxiety attack vs. heart attack.” A war was waging between the part of me that knew it was anxiety and the part that couldn’t stifle the feeling that my body was breaking. All it took to know that I was dying was reading the words that one symptom of a heart attack is a sense of impending doom, that in your gut you know that something isn’t right. That’s me! I thought. I definitely feel like I’m headed for the void!
“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I announced to my husband. At 1am, he rushed me to the emergency room. Two ultrasounds, one x-ray, one EKG, a hefty medical bill, and 8 hours later, I was released with a diagnosis of anxiety. I called out of work, still shaken.
Sometimes, going with your gut means forfeiting a battle you can’t afford to lose. Sometimes going with your gut means diagnosing yourself with three types of cancer and struggling not to cry at your desk. Sometimes going with your gut means accusing your loving partner for the third time that month of wanting to leave you. Sometimes it means believing you’ll never amount to anything, or that you can’t accomplish your goals. Sometimes going with your gut is bad advice– when you need someone to tell you to transcend it. I don’t condemn the gut, I don’t condemn the wonders of nature and intuition. As are many sufferers of anxiety, I am fairly superstitious, prone to the wims of my gut. But for the worriers of the world, I want you to know that your gut is not always right. Work to turn the volume down. Hone in on the lone voice in a sea of fears that tells you that things might turn out fine, that good things can happen, that life has pleasant surprises too, that there’s no way of knowing what’s to come– that you are allowed to be happy, and that sometimes happiness means going against your gut.
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