Diabetes, Anniversaries and Remembering
Or, what happens when your mind forgets but your body remembers
November 14th is World Diabetes Awareness Day. It’s also the anniversary of the day I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I am not someone who is naturally good with dates or anniversaries, it has taken nearly twenty years for me to be able to remember my closest friends’ birthdays and even now I still like someone else in the Whatsapp group to send the first “happy birthday!” message before I chip in. So it amuses me that my pancreas decided to give up on a date that I simply wouldn’t be allowed to forget.
At this time of year, I like to do a Twitter thread about all the things diabetes has taught me (you can read it here but essentially, don’t talk to me about your Zoe diet and learn how to Google). But there’s one thing that I’ve learned this year that has unsettled me somewhat; the concept of “The Anniversary Effect”.
The Anniversary Effect is essentially the idea that while our brains might find it hard to remember key event dates, our bodies don’t. For the past few days I’ve noticed myself feeling snappy with everything. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night feeling anxious but not quite sure what about. I haven’t really been able to settle to work and I’ve been late to everything. All of these are the usual signs that I’m stressed out about something but, beyond my boiler breaking for the second time in a month, there hasn’t been much to worry about. Until I realised where we are in the calendar.
When I look back at the messages I sent that day it feels a bit unreal. A message to my best friends asking them if I should be worried about the fact that I’m feeling really stressed, am drinking three litres of water a day and have lost 9kg in about three weeks. Them kindly but firmly telling me to call my GP, if only so I can prove to my panicking boyfriend that there’s nothing to worry about.
And then the messages to my boyfriend asking him to bring clean knickers and pyjamas to the hospital. Explaining that I’d called my mum and asked her to come and pick up the dog. Him worrying about me not having eaten all day, wanting to bring me food and me not knowing what I could or could not eat incase my body couldn’t handle it and I ended up back in the resuscitation unit again.
The prosaicness of the messages is what I find weird to look at now. Food. Clothes. What to do with the dog. And underneath all of that the terror of what might happen next in this body that I no longer knew.
If I close my eyes now I can feel that fear again. I can notice the slight trembling in my hands as I type this. The shallowness of my breathing. I can feel my jaw clenching and my mouth getting dry. We might be three years on but my body is still there on that hospital ward.
A few months after my diagnosis I did a some EMDR therapy with the wonderful Annalie Howling. I did it because I’d gradually come to realise that there were going to be more hospital appointments in my life and I couldn’t keep having a panic attack every time I walked into one. It really helped, in fact nowadays I can easily sit in a hospital waiting room for hours without bursting into tears or finding an unsuspecting doctor to pick a fight with (when it comes to the fear response, I’ve always been more fight than flight). The major thing it gave me was the ability to sit with the memory of that experience and treat it with compassion. It didn’t get rid of the fear altogether but it gave me enough space from it that I can see the response for what it is, a grief for what I lost on that day.
The Anniversary Effect can happen to any of us but it’s most commonly associated with losing a loved one. When we lose someone we loved, particularly when we lose them suddenly, we don’t just hold their memories in our brain but also in our body. Our body remembers the grief, even long after the event itself. When I first read about this I was angry with it. I want anniversaries to be beautiful things, a day to remember something joyous not something traumatic.
So I’ve had to reframe the Anniversary Effect to make sense of it. I’ve had to see it not as my body reliving all that trauma all over again but instead as a reminder that for there to be loss, there first has to be love. I can choose to hold onto the trauma or I can hold onto the love. I know which one I prefer.
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Sending my love and a beautiful reframing reminder why I always feel odd this time of year until the anniversary of my Mum’s death. Thank you and all the love. Xx