On Dithering
If dithering were a power source, I could light up Chicago. Good thing it burns nerve endings instead of fossil fuels.
The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of dithering and anxiety. I hardly ever get to enjoy the rush of hypomania – except for that one brief spell a few weeks ago – because it comes out sideways as anxiety.
I also have a third-degree black belt in catastrophizing.
Both have gotten a workout lately, since a cyst was discovered in my left breast. (I wrote flippantly about mammograms on my other blog, so irony gifted me with this.)
I checked my usual sources (Mayo Clinic website and a friend who is a biologist and had a lumpectomy), and the consensus was that I had only the remotest chance of the anomaly turning out to be anything really dire.
Do you think that stopped my dithering?
Hell no! Of course not!
What could have gone wrong?
They could have stuck a needle in my breast to aspirate fluid and get a sample for the lab. (A friend who should know tells me that some people do this kind of thing for fun. Somehow, it doesn’t appeal to me.)
If the results were worse, I could have been scheduled for a lumpectomy. There was extra anxiety on this one because my friend almost had a mastectomy instead of a lumpectomy when the surgeon started making the wrong incision. (An operating room tech noticed, saving the day and the breast.)
And of course, my anxiety told me that a mastectomy could be in my future (either on purpose or accidentally, I suppose). My mother had a mastectomy, which added extra oomph to the dithering.
A mastectomy would suck for oh so many reasons. Cancer, surgery, body image issues, obviously.
Also, I would keep falling over to the right. And before the operation I’d have to take my breast on a farewell tour for all its friends and admirers.
Maybe worst of all, I would have to put up with all the pinkness and positivity. Not to denigrate this strategy for those who find it helpful, but I am not that person. Anyone with my brain chemistry is not going to respond to slogans and cheerleading and daily affirmations. (Reminder – As always with my posts, YMMV.)
Barbara Ehrenreich has written about this phenomenon in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Apparently many breast cancer survivors feel they must get something positive from the experience – appreciating life and family more and so on.
We’ve come a long way from Betty Rollins’s First, You Cry. Now it seems like we’re never supposed to.
The anticlimactic but welcome result came today: Everything is OK. I just need to keep up with yearly mammograms.
And now I can move on to the next thing that needs dithering about – the work I wasn’t able to do while I was catastrophizing.
Janet Coburn
Bipolar Me 
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