Moments of Presence

Two stories of other people's presence making all the difference

I want to share two stories of times when people’s presence made a huge difference in the struggle that I was facing in the moment. But first, a little bit of backstory…

The stories that I’m going to share are significant to me because I am not really a “turn to another human for help in my moments of struggle” kind of person. I’m more of a “I’ll handle this myself and then maaaaybe reflect on it afterwards in a way that involves other humans.” A huge part of this is because so far in life, my difficult moments have tended to be an emotional struggle rather than something like a traumatic event or an ongoing illness that could require me to depend on other people in a more immediate/tangible kind of way. I don’t usually process things out loud, so when big, dark feelings come, it’s normal for me to not be able to put words to them until a little while later. Would there be any point to inviting another human into those moments? What could another person even do to help?

I didn’t realize how uncomfortable I was with the idea of inviting someone else into the immediate moment of struggle until a couple years ago, when l was a few sessions into therapy. I had chosen to give therapy a try after experiencing an increase in anxiety. At one point, after hearing me describe some recent anxious experiences, my therapist noted that in most of these situations I had been with people who I love and who love me. She suggested that perhaps, the next time this happened, I could try telling the person that I was with how I was feeling.

Hello, first time crying in therapy!

I felt that I simply would never be able to do that. It might make the other person I was with uncomfortable. It might make all the physical, anxious sensations I was feeling even worse. It might disrupt what was supposed to be a nice experience. My body, my can’t-swallow throat, my shakiness, my racing heart… I needed to be able to control these things on my own.

So, clearly, no.

I was not going to be inviting anyone into my anxious moments, thank you very much. I would simply carry on, dreading restaurants, movie theatres, churches, performances, road trips, sleeping anywhere other than my own home, and just generally any situation where I felt trapped. It would be fine.

And it was. I have gotten much better at being in these situations than I was a couple years ago. Talking with Ricky and some friends helped, although I still did not invite them into the actual anxious moments or believe that that would even be helpful.

The two stories that I am going to share here are times when someone stepped in to support me and I was proven wrong about other people not being able to help.

Story One: Ricky and Jasmine Go Outside

One huge frustration that I have with my anxiety is the way it sometimes shows up in situations where I KNOW that I am completely safe and with people I feel completely comfortable with. This was one of those situations.

It happened last summer amid a string of nights of sleeping away from home.

Ricky and I found ourselves in a cramped sleeping situation. Not only were we in a tiny bed, but we were also sharing the bedroom with someone else. Even the living room of the house we were staying in was going to have people sleeping in it. As bedtime approached, I was a little nervous because I knew that this was a prime opportunity for the anxiety to kick in. I was optimistic though, because I had just had a sleepless, anxious night the night before when we were sleeping somewhere else and figured that my exhaustion would dominate my anxiety and I’d be able to sleep.

Not so. Not so.

We strategically arranged ourselves in our tiny bed and I laid there in the dark waiting for sleep to come.

It did not.

Instead, all the anxious stuff started to happen and just kept happening until it got to the awful point where I was laying there shaking.

There was a stage of life where this kind of thing would happen regularly even at home, and I never bothered to wake Ricky up. I would just go out to the couch until I managed to calm down and fall asleep. But this time, because the bed was so small and he was also having trouble falling asleep, Ricky could tell that I was shaking.

I felt so stuck. The night looked impossibly long.

I tried sitting on the floor beside the bed, hoping that a change of position would make me feel better, but no such luck.

“Why don’t we just go outside?” Ricky whispered. “We could sit on the deck.”

It was such a simple idea, and one that I had considered, but felt that there were too many barriers to making it happen.

We’d have to get out of our dark, cramped little room quietly, and then make our way through the dark, cramped living room quietly, and then unlock the door quietly…

You see?

So many “barriers.”

But to Ricky, those barriers didn’t seem so legitimate.

So we did it.

We made it out to the deck and sat on the steps in beautifully damp and cedary 2 AM air.

I instantly felt better.

We hung out quietly for a bit and then got tired. Instead of going back inside to sleep, Ricky made a trip back in for our pillows and then we slept in our car for the rest of the night.

It was perfectly what I needed.

I would have felt strange and self-conscious doing all this by myself but having Ricky there with me normalized it.

He saw solutions and was able to make them happen when I was not able to, which was everything to me that night. It turned what would have been a long, awful night into a night where I felt newly empowered to do what I needed to do to help myself.

It was better to have someone with me in my anxiety than to be alone in it.

(Thanks, Ricky. <3 You’re the best person to be with, in any situation.)

Story Two: A Text Changes Everything

This story begins at the school that I work at.

Friday afternoon, out in the kindergarten yard, kids getting ready to go to the buses and kids getting picked up by their parents.

There are a couple kids who are considered “flight risks,” which means that if they have the chance to escape the safely fenced-in kindergarten area, they will take it. We always have several adults out there and we all try to be as eyes-on as possible to make sure that dangerous escapes don’t happen. However, the end of the day can be a chaotic time and we happened to be short-staffed this day.

Somehow one of our sweet students did manage to leave the yard.

None of us noticed him leave, until a mom who was picking up a child told me that she was pretty sure a kid had gotten out of the pen unaccompanied and then pointed in the direction of the street.

The street is busy at that time of day, with buses and parents’ vehicles.

My heart stopped before I flew down the path to the street.

Our little friend, blissfully unaware of danger, had managed to cross the road, which happened to be free of vehicles at the moment. Another school mom had seen him and was doing her best to guide him in a safe direction.

I took him back to the kindergarten yard.

He was upset about being brought back to the place he had successfully escaped from, but otherwise, he was fine.

(Yes, I have actual nightmares about losing children on a regular basis.)

Once the numbness of the experience passed, the what-ifs set in.

What if no one had seen him leave the yard? What if we wouldn’t have realized he was missing until ten minutes later when his bus arrived?

What if he’d been hit by a vehicle?

What if I was a terrible EA and should quit my job?

Even though everything had turned out okay, the situation weighed heavy on my mind. Because this happened on a Friday, I had all weekend to dedicate myself to ruminating on these thoughts. Yay!

Before I could settle into my negative thought cycles too deeply, I got a message from one of the people who supervises us EAs at work.

She told me that she’d heard what happened.

She told me that I shouldn’t take the responsibility for the situation upon myself, because it’s everyone’s job to be watching.

She told me a story of something similar that had happened recently.

She told me that I’m a valuable part of the team.

That message from her changed everything about how I thought about the situation. I was able to take the situation as a reminder to be vigilant always, instead of falling into the depths of despair over it.

That’s my second example of how the presence of someone else (via messaging) helped me through a situation that I would have really struggled with on my own.

In conclusion…

The presence of other people can apparently be helpful.

Who knew?

I will admit that I don’t really know what to do with this information, but it seems valuable to at least know it. It’s also a reminder to me to be aware of the struggles of the people around me and to be willing to step into the struggle with them, even if it’s only in a small way, because it just might make a difference for them.  

I was planning to write this post at Christmas time and tie it in neatly to the concept of Emmanuel: God With Us. I suppose that concept is just as necessary in February as it is in December!

I wish I was less awkward about writing about God, so that I could say something really tidy and true at this point.

Instead, I will just settle for saying that there is much I don’t understand about God and our relationship to him. But when we step willingly into each other’s difficult moments and lift the burden just a little, we are in a holy space. God is in those moments, whether you are the helper or the “helped” and whether the moment feels magically redemptive or just messy.

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Is it natural for you to turn to others for support in difficult moments?

Have there been times when the presence of someone else in your struggle made a difference in the situation for you?