Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today’s post is about nervous systems being stuck in panic/apocalypse mode—especially when the news feels extra heavy. Thanks so much for being here and supporting my work. If you liked this essay consider sharing it with a friend, or becoming a paid supporter. For the month of October I am discounting all paid subscriptions 20% off—this will be the last time I offer a discount like this since my subscriptions are already reasonably priced. Sign up today and you get this discount for life!
the cycles of the apocalypse
Now that I am almost 40 years old I am realizing how much of my life has been lived in panic mode in my mind. I was raised in a household with an end times parent who taught my little nervous system to always be on the alert for the apocalypse—to search the news headlines and to see the patterns of the conspiracies of the world. It’s not my fault that my entire body flushes with adrenaline, fear, anger, and hopelessness when the news starts to sound like the book of Revelation. This was ingrained in me as a helpless little child, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t terribly worried for the future.
I think this is why I have been obsessed with trying to figure out the puzzle of humanity from a very young age. As much as my mother terrified me with her constant talk of the end times, the persecution of Christians, the new world order, the violence of the antichrist—she was also convinced that God was in charge and in the end would win decisively. That heaven would be a place where there were no more tears, and instead all the wrongs on earth would be made right. As a small, terrified, and isolated child, I clung to this vision of a good God who would ultimately save me in the end. As I grew older I became more and more troubled by these certainties, because they all seemed to be predicated on exclusion. God was only going to save the “remnant” or the small group of faithful Christians. Everyone else was doomed, and we could be too if we weren’t careful. The cosmic battle was waging all around us, in the news headlines and in our own brains. If we could stand firm on the Truth of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and defend it to our last breath, then we could be assured of happiness, eternally.
The other day I thought about how the past few years of my life I have become obsessed with the dangers of evangelical theology—both on the personal and the political level. As a child who was indoctrinated into this belief system, it’s been a struggle at every turn to interrogate the ethics of the framework I was born into. There was the life-long commitment to serve god—with my every thought, action, and word—I made as a little child in order to please my parents. And then there was how that commitment was held over my head any time it appeared like I might be straying too far out of the bounds of what makes someone the redeemed, the elect, the faithful, the remnant. But in spite of all of that I couldn’t help myself from asking questions, over and over again. There seemed to be something very rotten at the core of the beliefs I was born into, yet everyone around me insisted it was good news. To crawl out of the bubble of high control religion I was born into, I’ve had to learn how to follow my questions, to study, and most importantly—to fight. I slowly learned over the years to utilize my nervous system and funnel the panic, shame, and fear into fighting the worldviews that I believe are harmful to so many people.
I’m proud of what I’ve done and where I have come from, while also recognizing that my body can’t be in fight mode all the time anymore. I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of books on trying to make sense of the world. I have written thousands and thousands of pages. I have posted intense thoughts on Twitter, Instagram, and Tik Tok, for over a decade. I am writing about Christian fascism for this newsletter and authoritarian evangelical parenting experts for a book and I’m attending local progressive democratic workshops and it still feels like it is never enough. There is always a thrum of panic, deep down inside of me, that I am not doing enough. That I am not being faithful, or one of the few elect ones. I can read the signs of the times and they are not good for so many reasons. If I don’t warn people, what could happen? We in the US are in a battle for the soul of democracy, with fascism rapidly gaining a hold. The stakes are sky high. They are apocalyptic. My nervous system is in battle mode, and refuses to let me relax.
Am I repeating the stories of childhood in my mind and in my life? To me, the world has always been ending, and I have always felt an incredible amount of pressure to do something to fix it. To live like this 24/7 is not only unsustainable but downright harmful. It makes sense why this happens, and why constant access to news about every terrible thing humans do to each other has contributed to my sense of fear about the future. My nervous system is overloaded, and these days I know nothing will help it except rest, and care, and accepting myself and my current limitations without shame. So I am going to try and find ways to do that. I still have a few posts planned for the anti-fascist fall, but there will also be some silly, soft, and quieter posts as well. I am learning to allow myself to be a human. Even if some of the systems that make up our world are ending, I still get to be a complicated, messy, healing person. Just like you are.
I keep hoping that I will magically wake up one day with a thicker skin. That I could be one of those people who can take the trolls and the callousness of humanity without it impacting them too much. But that isn’t me. At my core I am a soft person. I am as tender as a little chicken nugget. I am a little hedgehog, I am an immovable walrus, I am a wolf howling at the sky, I am a crow nursing its grudges against god. I am a scared child who wonders why the world is so unjust and why humans hurt each other so much. I am a grown person who has a hard time trusting other humans. I cry easily these days and burrow into my blankets and hug my dog and I grieve all the ways the world is set up to save a few and doom the rest.
Today the world is ending for some people, and I can feel the grief of that. But for me, it hasn’t ended yet. I am in my office, with my dog at my feet. My 8 year old just came into the room to ask me to watch some Bluey with him. He has been watching anime, but it is making him too sad. He wants to snuggle up in a blanket with me and watch Chili and Bandit and Bluey and Bingo love each other so well. So that’s what I am doing today, with the one little life that I have on this earth. I’m going to watch a cartoon with my child, and kiss his head, and feel him close to me. He is safe, he is loved, he is not afraid of his future. And once again I remember that the world is always ending, and it is always being remade at the exact same time.
I appreciate how you point out that even the feeling of urgency to call out the oppressive systems that we grew up being told were blamelessly good is a trauma response in itself. That sense of shame of never doing enough, of being enough, is something I am intimately familiar with. I have been feeling so tender these last few days, noticing the myriad of ways my body is dealing not only with religious trauma but also that gut reaction to fight back the bullies that I felt often as a child whenever confronted to American supremacism and militarism overseas.
I read this with an exhausted three year old snuggled beside me sleeping away. She needs my arm so that’s what I am offering the world right now. Thank you, as always, for your thoughtful wisdom.