Where did the Meditations Go? and Where Have I Been?
“Vertigo” or “Where I’ve Been in Case You Missed Me?”
I’ve never understood why those thrill seekers chase storms. They always seem to find me all on their own.
In the second or third week of January (so hard for me to believe that I actually had to trace it back on the calendar) my life literally fell into a spin like a hurricane or a tornado had blown in taking the house that was me up into for more than half a year. That’s where I have been.
It was a weekday, a workday evening and I was driving home around 7pm on the 55 freeway South going home. There was traffic. And then the world started to spin. And the car started to spin and rattle and shake like I was inside a child’s toy gyroscope or a time travel machine out of an old science fiction movie I couldn’t remember or in the middle of a washing machine violently thrusting like the inside of a giant crashing wave throwing you to the ground but not stopping.
And I thought: oh, God. Not again. This is it. This is the day I die. This is the moment. And I thought, oh, well, if this is my time, I’m ready. My affairs are in order and I’m as right as I can be with everyone who is important to me. And I said out loud
“God, please help me.”
And blindly, I tried to hold onto the wheel and I pushed the emergency button for the flashers on the dashboard and with no choices, I started to veer across the lanes and the next lanes beyond all logic and laws of gravity to a stop on the side of the road soaked with sweat and sick to my stomach in a way that it spread dusky green through my entire body like the flesh of a zombie. And I tried to close my eyes to try to just make it stop.
All of this had happened to me about a year and a half before. At that time, there had been three or four, maybe five attacks that in a cluster that lasted about three weeks before they stopped. Without explanation. And they always happened when I was driving.
And here I was again on the side of the road afraid that I was going to hit by the speeding traffic begging for it not to hit me and for the vertigo to subside until I couldn’t wait anymore. I inched the car down the next exit ramp, rolled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 put the seat back and fell into a sweaty sleep. I couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Vertigo is not just the name of a Hitchcock movie or always a little dizziness that’s more of an inconvenience than anything else or a self-indulgence that neurotics get over dramatic about. Vertigo is more than dizziness. Vertigo is a bodily state of terror, the physical illusion that the world is moving around you even though things are actually standing still although it isn’t really happening and a body full of panic and sickness.
Most cases of vertigo are caused by tiny bone fragments within the inner ear that have become dislodged and are causing an equilibrium imbalance (this is called Benign Positional Vertigo). But not here.
I went to the Doctor and I went to the Chiropractor and they moved my head around to shake the little bone shards lose but it didn’t help. And I took sea sickness medicines, Dramamine and Meclazine that made me sleepy but helped only a little. And I wore pressure point sea sickness bracelets and vertigo aromatherapy drops. But I wasn’t on the high seas.
I went to the eye doctor and went to physical therapy for eye exercises because your eyes and your stomach play huge roles in your equilibrium and balance. And that helped a lot but didn’t solve the problem. And I went to an inner ear dizziness specialist and they wondered if maybe I might have had a stroke. Or whether I had a brain tumor or if I had MS. They gave me a referral to a neurologist to examine my brain to rule these things out but I was too afraid to go. I didn’t even want to drive to the doctor’s office.
The group suggestion seemed to be that it was all likely caused by a virus in my ear and that there was no way to tell how long it might go on. It might be a few months or disappear tomorrow. Then again they told me, for some people, it just never goes away. They just have to learn to live with it for the rest of their lives. My mind reeled and now my mind was spinning. I felt broken and fell into a state of panic and depression and the anxiety and depression got worse as the days went by.
I was prescribed more medicine to get my body to relax because now why whole body would lock up and freeze which only made the symptoms come on more. It helped, especially when I had to drive which had become a regular experience like something out of a horror movie. You never know how much of your life depends on driving until you can’t do it anymore.
The medicines started to effect me but I didn’t get it that something was going wrong. I was so relieved for the times when the panic would break that I just bought that whatever the side effects were, I just had to put up with them. And I believed that I had no choices, that this was the only thing that I could do that this terrible doom fate had been visited upon me and more and more there was no way out.
I was sleeping in every free moment because I could hardly stay awake but my family thought I was more lazy than incapacitated. The irony was that I had written a book about fighting depression, finding your True Authentic Self and pulling yourself out of the darkness and now I had reached a point where I was so knocked down that I couldn’t do anything to support the book or make it known in the world. I had come to live in this ongoing state of despair just trying to keep walking, wishing desperately not wanting to be different but with people everywhere I’d go coming up to me and saying “Are you all right? You don’t look like yourself. Are you sure you are OK? I’m worried about you.”
It was when only when I realized that I had lost my capacity to write (that is handwrite) and that when I read the left side pages of books the words would float and move around and switch places. Then I saw that the left side of my body was jerking involuntarily and I was slurring my words. And I started to think that maybe I actually had had a stroke. Isn’t this what would happen to you? And I was terrified because that was what had caused my mother’s father’s death of years of endless suffering.
In my fear and desperate denial to believe I had not had a stroke, I did not see that I had become dependent on the medicines and once I finally go it, I immediately went to the doctors to get detoxed. I gave up and made the decision that if I had to live in a world where I would never be able to leave the house and just give up on trying to go out and interact with the rest of the world, that it would have to be better than this.
It took about two and a half months for my body to balance out again and then it was physically over. And it took three months after that to bounce back from how low I had become and the tolls it had taken in virtually every area of my life. To just to be able to get up and stand up and just be able to function and get back into the stream of life.
It is now August 26, 2012, and at the time of this writing, things have stabilized. Cross your fingers. Is it really over? And I actually feel hopeful again, like things are good and maybe a shoe won’t drop. It’s been almost like rebuilding a city after a flood or after a storm after some time has passed.
And I am back swimming in all my work again and swimming in my life. Like swimming in waters that have balanced out again after that storm, after the hurricane and the tornado have gone.
And I have to remember one more time that even when the sky seems darkest, it’s only a sign that light is coming. That the light is on the way.
And I guess it’s really true that they do…
(as someone once told me)
All storms pass.
-- Luke Benoit, CC CPH
Certified Professional Hypnotist
Certified Life Coach
Author, All Storms Pass: The Anti-Meditations
ALL STORMS PASS; The Anti-Meditations
I’ve never understood why those thrill seekers chase storms. They always seem to find me all on their own.
In the second or third week of January (so hard for me to believe that I actually had to trace it back on the calendar) my life literally fell into a spin like a hurricane or a tornado had blown in taking the house that was me up into for more than half a year. That’s where I have been.
It was a weekday, a workday evening and I was driving home around 7pm on the 55 freeway South going home. There was traffic. And then the world started to spin. And the car started to spin and rattle and shake like I was inside a child’s toy gyroscope or a time travel machine out of an old science fiction movie I couldn’t remember or in the middle of a washing machine violently thrusting like the inside of a giant crashing wave throwing you to the ground but not stopping.
And I thought: oh, God. Not again. This is it. This is the day I die. This is the moment. And I thought, oh, well, if this is my time, I’m ready. My affairs are in order and I’m as right as I can be with everyone who is important to me. And I said out loud
“God, please help me.”
And blindly, I tried to hold onto the wheel and I pushed the emergency button for the flashers on the dashboard and with no choices, I started to veer across the lanes and the next lanes beyond all logic and laws of gravity to a stop on the side of the road soaked with sweat and sick to my stomach in a way that it spread dusky green through my entire body like the flesh of a zombie. And I tried to close my eyes to try to just make it stop.
All of this had happened to me about a year and a half before. At that time, there had been three or four, maybe five attacks that in a cluster that lasted about three weeks before they stopped. Without explanation. And they always happened when I was driving.
And here I was again on the side of the road afraid that I was going to hit by the speeding traffic begging for it not to hit me and for the vertigo to subside until I couldn’t wait anymore. I inched the car down the next exit ramp, rolled into the parking lot of a Motel 6 put the seat back and fell into a sweaty sleep. I couldn’t believe this was happening again.
Vertigo is not just the name of a Hitchcock movie or always a little dizziness that’s more of an inconvenience than anything else or a self-indulgence that neurotics get over dramatic about. Vertigo is more than dizziness. Vertigo is a bodily state of terror, the physical illusion that the world is moving around you even though things are actually standing still although it isn’t really happening and a body full of panic and sickness.
Most cases of vertigo are caused by tiny bone fragments within the inner ear that have become dislodged and are causing an equilibrium imbalance (this is called Benign Positional Vertigo). But not here.
I went to the Doctor and I went to the Chiropractor and they moved my head around to shake the little bone shards lose but it didn’t help. And I took sea sickness medicines, Dramamine and Meclazine that made me sleepy but helped only a little. And I wore pressure point sea sickness bracelets and vertigo aromatherapy drops. But I wasn’t on the high seas.
I went to the eye doctor and went to physical therapy for eye exercises because your eyes and your stomach play huge roles in your equilibrium and balance. And that helped a lot but didn’t solve the problem. And I went to an inner ear dizziness specialist and they wondered if maybe I might have had a stroke. Or whether I had a brain tumor or if I had MS. They gave me a referral to a neurologist to examine my brain to rule these things out but I was too afraid to go. I didn’t even want to drive to the doctor’s office.
The group suggestion seemed to be that it was all likely caused by a virus in my ear and that there was no way to tell how long it might go on. It might be a few months or disappear tomorrow. Then again they told me, for some people, it just never goes away. They just have to learn to live with it for the rest of their lives. My mind reeled and now my mind was spinning. I felt broken and fell into a state of panic and depression and the anxiety and depression got worse as the days went by.
I was prescribed more medicine to get my body to relax because now why whole body would lock up and freeze which only made the symptoms come on more. It helped, especially when I had to drive which had become a regular experience like something out of a horror movie. You never know how much of your life depends on driving until you can’t do it anymore.
The medicines started to effect me but I didn’t get it that something was going wrong. I was so relieved for the times when the panic would break that I just bought that whatever the side effects were, I just had to put up with them. And I believed that I had no choices, that this was the only thing that I could do that this terrible doom fate had been visited upon me and more and more there was no way out.
I was sleeping in every free moment because I could hardly stay awake but my family thought I was more lazy than incapacitated. The irony was that I had written a book about fighting depression, finding your True Authentic Self and pulling yourself out of the darkness and now I had reached a point where I was so knocked down that I couldn’t do anything to support the book or make it known in the world. I had come to live in this ongoing state of despair just trying to keep walking, wishing desperately not wanting to be different but with people everywhere I’d go coming up to me and saying “Are you all right? You don’t look like yourself. Are you sure you are OK? I’m worried about you.”
It was when only when I realized that I had lost my capacity to write (that is handwrite) and that when I read the left side pages of books the words would float and move around and switch places. Then I saw that the left side of my body was jerking involuntarily and I was slurring my words. And I started to think that maybe I actually had had a stroke. Isn’t this what would happen to you? And I was terrified because that was what had caused my mother’s father’s death of years of endless suffering.
In my fear and desperate denial to believe I had not had a stroke, I did not see that I had become dependent on the medicines and once I finally go it, I immediately went to the doctors to get detoxed. I gave up and made the decision that if I had to live in a world where I would never be able to leave the house and just give up on trying to go out and interact with the rest of the world, that it would have to be better than this.
It took about two and a half months for my body to balance out again and then it was physically over. And it took three months after that to bounce back from how low I had become and the tolls it had taken in virtually every area of my life. To just to be able to get up and stand up and just be able to function and get back into the stream of life.
It is now August 26, 2012, and at the time of this writing, things have stabilized. Cross your fingers. Is it really over? And I actually feel hopeful again, like things are good and maybe a shoe won’t drop. It’s been almost like rebuilding a city after a flood or after a storm after some time has passed.
And I am back swimming in all my work again and swimming in my life. Like swimming in waters that have balanced out again after that storm, after the hurricane and the tornado have gone.
And I have to remember one more time that even when the sky seems darkest, it’s only a sign that light is coming. That the light is on the way.
And I guess it’s really true that they do…
(as someone once told me)
All storms pass.
-- Luke Benoit, CC CPH
Certified Professional Hypnotist
Certified Life Coach
Author, All Storms Pass: The Anti-Meditations
ALL STORMS PASS; The Anti-Meditations
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