Part 3: Okay, okay. I get it.
After committing to writing my historical novel based solely on guidance from my inner self, I worked on it steadily – and enjoyed the process immensely! In the fall of 2018, I completed the first draft of what I was calling Above the River. Set in post-WWII Germany, it told the tale of three generations of a German family whose members are forced to confront questions of God and faith and free will when the youngest family member, Lina, is paralyzed in an accident on the family’s homestead.
I had, indeed, managed to write the novel just for myself, free of the influence of suggestions or critiques from outside readers. True, early on, I did give the first thirty pages or so to the friend who’d encouraged me to get back to writing in the first place. I asked her simply whether, having read those opening chapters, she would want to read more. I guess I was still feeling the need for some validation of my project. But after that, no one read a word of the novel until after I’d completed the second draft, at the end of 2018. Even then, the friend I spontaneously offered it to, read only the first couple of chapters. Then, her own inner guidance prompted her to set it aside That felt just right to me, too, because, by then, I’d realized that I wanted to make some significant changes to the novel before trying to get it published. That’s when I began working on the third draft, which turned, at the end of 2019, into the fourth draft. Then, in January of this year, I had a big insight: Instead of working to find an agent who could help me get my book published, I needed to totally rework the novel, and make Lina’s mother, Ethel, the central voice of the narrative.
I was less than two weeks into this rewrite when a series of experiences made it abundantly clear to me that suggestion to completely rework the novel had not come from my inner self after all. Rather, what I’d heard – and heeded – was the voice of the deep, insidious fear I talked about in my last post: the fear that if I wrote and published exactly what I wanted, then people would respond negatively and reject me. At some point after I finished the first draft of my novel, this fear had come forth and managed to convincingly disguise itself as the voice of my inner self. “Keep revising,” it told me. “This book isn’t ready to go out into the world yet.”
Now, I can say for certain that my inner self was the source of this latest understanding – that I’d been mistaken about the origin of the advice to keep revising. This time, though, my inner self didn’t communicate with me in the way it most often does: by sending along messages when I’m sitting quietly and asking for guidance. Because at this point, I wasn’t sitting down asking it to advise me about the novel. I can see now that my inner self had been trying for a long time to tell me, subtly, to stop revising my novel and do something to actually get it out in the world. But, as I’ve said before, my inner self speaks softly, so I wasn’t hearing it. And precisely because I hadn’t picked up on its quiet messages, my inner self had to get dramatic. This time it chose to speak to me not through a thought, but in a way I couldn’t ignore: in the form of an illness.
I’ve become convinced, over the past ten years or so, that our inner self uses physical illness or mental discomfort to communicate with us when we miss or disregard the subtler communiques it sends us through thoughts and feelings. The way I see it, when an illness crops up, this is often our inner self clueing us in that a current course of action or behavior pattern is not in our best interest, and that we need to be doing something in our life differently.
I believe that when we come down with an illness, we can see it both as a very real illness and as our inner self’s attempt to give us a message. If we can understand what course of action or way of thinking our inner self is trying to warn us about, then we can adjust the way we move through life. This can, in turn, help alleviate the physical or mental or emotional discomfort we’re feeling, i.e., the given illness we’re experiencing.
So, when I get sick, or when a part of my body starts hurting for no identifiable reason, I ask myself what the metaphorical significance might be, of both the illness itself and the part of my body where it has popped up: “What is this illness trying to show me about where I’m going wrong in my life?” This is exactly the type of deep inquiry I had occasion to do at the end of 2019, when my inner self decided I wasn’t hearing what it had to say about my novel writing. The illness it used to get my attention was hypothyroidism.
Underactive thyroid often goes unnoticed and undiagnosed for years, which is exactly what happened with me. I had no idea that anything was amiss until my underactive thyroid started manifesting as anxiety attacks. The first time this happened, in mid-December, I was caught totally unawares. I suddenly felt terrified, for no discernible reason. I just couldn’t manage to calm myself down using any of the tools that generally quiet my mind pretty easily if I become distressed. My heart was racing and pounding, I felt faint, my skin was flushed, and there was a tightness in my chest. As the anxiety flooded through me, I felt a sense of impending doom: “You might just die tonight.” I thought this with a kind of eerie calm alongside the mounting anxiety that felt like it was originating somewhere other than inside me. This simply did not feel like “me” to me.
When these symptoms didn’t abate, and the feeling of doom persisted, I called an ambulance. For the first time in my life, I ended up in the Emergency Room, where the doctor determined that I was not having a heart attack. This was excellent news! (Thankfully, various subsequent tests showed that my heart is in good working order.) But that left the anxiety attacks, which kept occurring, with greater and greater frequency, over the next couple of weeks. Even though the doctors on my two subsequent visits to the ER (!!) told me that I could just ride these episodes out, because there really was no danger to my heart, I was beside myself. The attacks sometimes woke me out of a sound sleep. One day I had four of them. I had no idea what to do. Would they continue to plague me for the rest of my life?
At this point, I was not yet in any shape to engage in spiritual inquiry about what my inner self was trying to tell me. I couldn’t get calm enough to do that. It was all I could do to make it through each day and night without being totally overwhelmed by panic.
The attacks had been going on for nearly three weeks before my primary care doctor discovered, while reviewing my many test results, that my thyroid hormone level was way off. While doing some research, I discovered that anxiety attacks are not at all uncommon for folks with an underactive thyroid. My doctor prescribed a thyroid hormone replacement drug, and once I began taking it, the anxiety attacks lessened dramatically, both in frequency and intensity. Within about ten days, they’d vanished. I was incredibly relieved by this.
At the same time, though, I fully believed that the anxiety attacks were my inner self’s way of communicating something to me. And the terrifying intensity of what I’d experienced during the previous three weeks indicated to me that, whatever this message was, it was urgent. I knew that I needed to understand it and act on it. The fact that the replacement hormone was preventing the attacks was helping me get through each day, but this alone wouldn’t fix whatever it was that my inner self was trying to show me was out of whack. I knew full well that if I didn’t take action now, my inner self would find another, even more dramatic, way to get my attention. The anxiety attacks, although scary, weren’t actually life-threatening. The next message might be, and I certainly didn’t want to have to go through that! So, now that the attacks had faded, thanks to the medication, I was once again able to calm down enough to meditate effectively. I began reflecting on what my inner self was trying to tell me with this hypothyroidism.
I started by considering the thyroid gland. It’s located in the throat, and the throat is associated with our voice, and, thus, with self-expression. So, I reasoned, an underactive thyroid could indicate underactive self-expression. This is where the hypothyroidism stumped me for a couple of weeks. How can I not be expressing myself enough? I wondered. For heaven’s sake, I’ve written this whole novel! Isn’t that enough? What’s more – and this was what really didn’t make sense to me – why did the hypothyroidism manifest as anxiety attacks in me? What in the world was I so afraid of?
Then, one evening, during my meditation session, I sensed a lump in my throat. It felt like something inside me was trying to push its way out. I understood that something in me desperately needed to be expressed. I just couldn’t discern what. I felt intuitively that if I could just understand what it was, I’d also grasp what my inner self was seeking to tell me with the hypothyroidism. I voiced a silent wish to understand what was trying to make its way out of me.
The next morning, I went to my favorite coffee shop, as was my habit, and sat down to work on the novel. But I just couldn’t do it. It simply didn’t feel right. So I stopped. I sat there, staring at the computer screen. And within a few minutes, I understood why writing the novel hadn’t been “enough”: Writing this novel couldn’t possibly satisfy my inner self’s need for self-expression precisely because I was writing solely for myself, instead of sharing what I’d created with the world. The hypothyroidism was a hint from my inner self that I was under-expressing myself by keeping my writing to myself.
But what about the anxiety attacks? Why did I need to have those? Why wasn’t simply being diagnosed with – and understanding – the hypothyroidism sufficient? As I sat there in front of the computer, the answer to this mystery began to come into focus for me: This whole process of writing the novel was about changing two deeply-ingrained behavior patterns, not one. By the time the hypothyroidism was diagnosed, I had overcome one of them: the fear of writing what felt right to me, without having anyone else sign off on it. I’d learned to do that as I wrote my novel. However, for the past year, I had remained in the tight grip of a second fear: that if I shared my novel with others, the world would reject my heartfelt, sincere creative work – and me along with it.
It was this, second, fear that had masqueraded as the voice of my inner self. Each time I completed a new draft, each time it seemed that maybe I was done with the novel, this fear sent me a gut feeling that urged me to keep writing. It was stalling for time, to keep me from experiencing the inevitable rejection it believed would come if I shared my honest writing. It succeeded in its quest for more than a year, because it managed to speak to me in a gut feeling that was relatively muted, as gut feelings go. And although I am certain that my inner self was, meanwhile, doing its best to subtly clue me in to what was going on, it was still quieter than the gut feeling, and I just wasn’t hearing what it had to say. So, eventually, my inner self decided, “The whispering isn’t working. I’m gonna have to shout.” This was where the anxiety attacks came in: My inner self was challenging me to a high stakes game of spiritual, physical, and psychological connect-the-dots. It was giving me the chance to recognize just how terrified I was of getting my novel out into the world.
That’s what happened that morning in the coffee shop: I succeeded in connecting the dots that linked my writing process and my fears to the hypothyroidism and the anxiety attacks. Once I saw all these links, my inner self’s message to me also became clear: “You need to not only express yourself honestly on paper, but overcome your fear of putting what you write out into the world. Do you see what this fear is doing to your body and mind? Do you see how it’s been holding you back?” I did see. Finally. And when I did – that’s when I understood that I needed to start writing something that I could actually put out in the world in a timely fashion. As I saw it, this was a matter of life and death for me, because my inner self wasn’t going to mess around anymore. I would ignore its message at my peril.
Once I grasped all of this, that morning in the coffee shop, I experienced a quiet, peaceful awareness, deep inside me. Definitely a message from my inner self, and not a gut feeling. I knew exactly what I needed to do: I closed the document file that contained the latest version of my novel. Then I opened a new file and began writing this series of posts. “Making Our Way” came into being at that moment – the moment when I consciously made the commitment to write exactly what I feel guided by my inner self to write, and to then share my writing with the world – with you. I’m done letting fear call the shots.
Sue Downing 