Ten Times I Said No To Love: Chapter 6

The Intimidator

The desire to tell my love story in long form stemmed from a lot of things: honoring the lead-up to our wedding as a little gift to Christopher, writing a short history of the farm with the barn in the background instead of the central character, my love for creative essays — all of it. But mostly, this story is writing itself as I become more aware that much of my life is spent doing things driven by obligation. Writing has been my medium for so long—driven by purpose, topics, and tasks—that I’d forgotten what it feels like to write simply for the pleasure of it.

This story is all about writing my way back into that sense. It’s about delight and the assorted heartaches that happen to make us recognize when joy shows up. This story allows me to write myself back into the realization of awe and connection.

I’ve given myself the freedom to be completely raw about what it’s like living with anxiety disorder in this chapter because anxiety has also led me to joy — I promise, it has a way of doing that if we allow it. And without fear, I wouldn’t know The Intimidator — more on that in the closing section.

Chapter 6 of my story begins with fear and ends with a force of nature.

If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read (or listen to) previous sections of my story, Ten Times I Said No To Love here:

|| Chapter One || Chapter Two || Chapter Three || Chapter Four || Chapter Five ||

Let’s get started.

Photo by Avery Murray on Unsplash

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Ten Times I Said No To Love

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6. The Intimidator

All things are poisons, for there is nothing without poisonous qualities. It is only the dose which makes a thing poison.
— Paracelsus

Only one relationship has truly defined my life. It’s not horses, writing, or the string of romantic partners I’ve brought into my world, trying to fill gaps with brittle, unsuitable caulk. These things have shaped me, but they haven’t made me.

My deepest, most transformative, most time-tested relationship has been with anxiety. She’s carved me up with rusty knives and formed me like sculptor’s clay. Anxiety is a brilliant artist. I thank her for getting me here.

Without anxiety, I wouldn’t have been hauling horses home from a horse show in my trailer. I wouldn’t have been sleep deprived and without food and gauged out from terror because my husband had suddenly left and I had no idea how to run the farm by myself. Without anxiety, I wouldn’t have pulled to the side of the road and asked for help as three horses swayed and banged in the trailer, my vision dimmed, my mouth dry, and the strobing, afternoon light coming through the trees blinding me. Feeling like I was going to pass out, anxiety instructed me to slow down and listen.

Without anxiety, I would have normal jobs and a normal life, and I’d be dreaming of a farm house with a front porch and an ever-revolving stream of guests. In my mid-twenties, I was a writer covering food and arts. I had a paid job in an art museum. People gave me money to hang art on their walls. I had my dream jobs. Who does that?

For what I lacked in breeding as I lived and worked in this old-order, southern town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I made up for in my God-given ability to treasure hunt people’s stories. I talked to people. They talked back, everyone from museum security guards to heads of global corporations. My ability to speak to people happened beyond me, despite me — like writing and rebuilding from ashes — connections happened no matter how scared I was beneath it all. Fear and uncertainty, in the right circumstances, can be superpowers.

After functioning like this my entire, young life, my nervous system shattered like brittle glass. I could barely leave the house. I paid people to visit restaurants and report back so I’d make the deadline for my weekly cuisine column. I lost forty pounds because emetophobia convinced me that any nourishment would make me sick.

Anxiety is a shapeshifter that changes skins with the seasons, but the incarnation that hit me in my mid-twenties was a continuous heart-racing, nauseous, burning, dry-mouthed terror of life. Trapped inside the box of it, I couldn’t feel my way out.

I sought answers from doctors and therapists, trying brand-new treatments like EMDR. It was the turn of the millennia and my entire life was in front of me. Anxiety was my dirty, shameful secret, the thing I needed to hide and fix as soon as possible. I was paralyzed by visceral, unnamed fears and coped by treating anxiety like a wasting disease, something that was happening to me instead of being born from me.

With a tiny safety net in savings, I quit my jobs and decided to take a year off to reassess, seek help, and write a book.

I knew that spending time in nature and being around horses helped me cope as a kid, so I took a part-time job feeding horses at a farm in a section of the foothills known as the Dark Corner. The hundred-acre farm, steeped in moonshining history and ancient lore, absorbed the sunlight as it sank behind the hills. It was always shrouded in a kind of twilight. The harsh midday sun only deepened my symptoms, so I opted for an afternoon shift after a series of chaotic interviews that any sane person would have walked away from. But something about the farm promised a fresh start, a place where I could find healing in the shadows of the lush spring grass.

If I could manage to leave the house and stomach the drive to this place, I knew I’d find the help that had eluded me in traditional medicine. That’s why my farm doesn’t offer "therapeutic services" today. We intentionally remain outside the clinical realm, giving us the freedom to explore what works for each individual human because I, as an individual human, tried everything I could find to fix anxiety with no relief until the horses breathed acceptance, homeostasis, and hope back into my malnourished spirit.

I don’t know why they help us. I don’t want to know. What I do know is that they do. Faith works beyond reason. Farms became my church.

This farm in the Dark Corner was a half-hour drive from my house and I reached it by back country roads. Interstates had become off-limits to me, even though I’d driven all over the country before this anxiety crisis. The rules for my life had changed. I learned how to operate in ever-shortening parameters like a rogue cow being squeezed into a chute. Anxiety worked through brute force. She spoke; I obeyed.

After sorting through the names and personalities in this farm of fifty horses, most of them chestnut in color, I found salvation in the work, the monotony of feeding, the methodical art of cleaning stalls.

Science now shows us that repetitive, purposeful work helps us process complex trauma. Or, as a study published in The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience states, “Playing Tetris may act as a cognitive interference task and as a brain-training intervention. . .”

My medical charts showed PTSD, anxiety, and depression going back to childhood, but I didn’t learn this until my old records were digitized and added to the system twenty years later.

I just knew that I felt better when all the stalls were cleaned. Working in a long, cement barn where all the high-dollar horses and stallions were housed, I understood the boiling emotions of these complex creatures contained in an environment that was at odds with their instincts. They frightened me at times, but my fear was tangible, direct, a call to action. Fear inspired by something real was so much better than the nebulous terror that boiled inside my mind and skin day and night.

Being with the horses was like homeopathy, like micro-dosing the feelings that I wanted to banish.

Plus, no one really talks to the stall cleaner. I was free to come and go like a ghost. I stayed below the notice of most visitors, except for a weathered cowboy named Tommy Smith.

“You’ve got bird legs,” he said, leaning against the open stall door one day, watching me work.

“That’s nice,” I said. “You smell like a warthog.” He’d been out baling hay all day in the hundred-degree summer drought. The bales they stacked were brown and light in weight, not enough to get the farm through the winter.

I’d worn shorts to work that day and my skinny legs were pale and aching, like popsicle sticks plucked into my boots.

“We haven’t smacked the city out of you yet,” he said.

“I’m taking time off to write a book.”

“You and me have two very different ideas of time off.”

I leaned on my stall fork and willed him to shut up with my eyes.

“Can you ride?”

“I’ve ridden most of my life,” I said.

“Yeah, but can you really ride?”

Soon after, I bought a chestnut gelding named Max and Tommy took me on as his apprentice, mentor, and friend — which is its own story. Under his chicken hawk gaze, I eventually began taking students of my very own.

Standing in the barn aisle with an adult rider who owned a rescued Saddlebred, we de-briefed her ride and I explained how anxiety is a shared, normal part of living, a sign to take action or change course.

“Don’t use that word,” she said.

“What? Living?”

“Anxiety. You’re just starting your business and when you share stories of your struggle with it, you don’t sound professional. People will lose faith in your skills.” The client was thick in the corporate swamp and the post-millennial world was embracing the clever magic of corporate culture with all its depersonalized lingo.

“Have you lost faith in me?” I asked.

“No, but I’m different. I know you. I worry about you leading with your story when people haven’t had the chance to see you yet.”

“I’m not worried about that,” I said, because I wasn’t. Her warning was a compassionate challenge that pushed me to turn the conversation around anxiety and panic into a business model—because the world was, and still is, hungry for validation.

Twenty-five years later, Max is still with me and I’m daily living the question of why horses help us feel better. I daily live with debilitating anxiety — but the horses, like Tommy, have shown me a thing or two. They’ve taught me that there is a fine line between panic and drive. They’ve shown me that I can harness anxiety when it’s an energy that is acknowledged and noticed. I can give it a home, tend to its needs, and see if it wants to collaborate.

We’re allowed, as a culture, to talk about anxiety now, to use its name. But no one — the doctors, the scientists, the preachers — really understand it. I don’t think they can ever understand fear and survival, the mechanisms of action, as the horses do.

I still hate driving on interstates, but people travel from all over to visit my farm and have a safe space to explore the information beneath their overactive nervous systems. I’ve traveled all over and I function well most days, figuring out what’s beneath my overactive nervous system. My triggers are still there, but they’re muted. They’re flares that light the candle over spots I need to examine.

So when I was asked to travel to Colorado to present the story of my farm and work to a gathering of colleagues dedicated to eradicating old, outdated practices in the horse industry, I couldn’t say no. The air travel would be fine, but I needed someone to help me navigate highways, someone to make sure I made it from Point A to Point B so I had the fuel to manage public speaking.

I speak in front of people all day—it's a normal part of my life. But standing before a group in an indoor setting, with weeks of preparation and rumination, pulls me right back to the starved version of myself with bird legs who once showed up to clean horse stalls. In those moments, all I want is for everyone to stop talking and leave me alone.

I needed a travel partner with the power to cut through my bullshit.

No one reaches out to you for compassion or empathy so you can teach them how to behave better. They reach out to us because they believe in our capacity to know our darkness well enough to sit in the dark with them.
— Brené Brown

When my bravery bank is depleted, I call on a force of nature. Her friends call her Jenn, but the world knows her as The Jennifer Walker. In truth, she should come with a safe word.

She owned an entertainment group that threw raves and managed DJs, sold all that, and went into Atlanta, Georgia real estate where she showed the industry how to use the infancy of the internet to sell houses.

But if you ask Jennifer, her real work takes place in the spaces between the key points of her resume. Like when she accompanied her friend Naomi to chemo infusions and they wore elaborately themed costumes, bringing the gift of themselves and joy to all the patients and nurses. Or her daily, seven-mile hikes through the wilds of the Atlanta urban wilderness where she picks up trash and adopts lonely people into her beautifully curated global family of weirdos, artists, and geniuses.

I was lucky. I got in on the ground floor of the Walker Empire when I was thirteen years old. She bossed me at school, invited me to her house, and from that point forward, we ate Whoppers with cheese and navigated continuous parental restrictions and weird home lives. We snuck out, did shots, dressed like goth queens, and have kept in touch ever since. We found each other when we desperately needed something solid to lean on, and we can go five years without speaking and pick right back where we left off, often down to the topic and sentence.

Our relationship is a continual run-on sentence filled with rich metaphor, tension, climax, denouement, and setting. We are each other’s witnesses, like wholly irreverent priests in the confessional of life.

For people not in her inner sanctum, a brush with her energy is like being side-swiped with a sudden blow to a blind spot. She is beautiful, with piercing green eyes and an effortless ability to work a room. She is unfiltered and raw and powerful and has never played by any rules except her own.

I met Jennifer on the first day of high school. Coming from a private, Christian school where the uniform for girls was dresses and my first panic attack was inspired by someone practicing trumpet in the school gym — I thought it signaled the second coming of Jesus — public school was a dream of possibilities, but also a big adjustment.

Jennifer passed me in the hallway and scanned me in appraisal, her whole demeanor a crafted sculpture in brazen, punk rock confidence. She terrified me. She enthralled me.

I slid into my homeroom seat nervous, confused, and excited to see what would happen next. I’d broken free of the prison of fear that had defined school from my earliest K-5 memories and stepped into something else, something equally terrifying but significantly better.

The homeroom teacher asked us to introduce ourselves. Our arrangement was alphabetical. There weren’t many people before me.

“Kim Carter,” I said, because my father forbade me to shorten my name.

A little skater boy across the room turned and smiled at me. He seemed genuinely kind, which surprised me. He didn’t seem to be suited up in cynicism. He didn’t need to be. He was just him.

I sat through the introductions, waiting to catch his name.

“Chris Miller,” he said.

I committed his name to memory.

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I snap Christopher’s black, elastic hair tie on my wrist as I sway upright in the human herd of people on the tram in the Atlanta airport.

I dodge people as I race to the gate.

I hear Jennifer Walker before I see her sitting at a cafe table with two strangers she’s tamed into being friends through her skilled trait of soul-stalking. She’ll have any stranger’s secrets in the time it takes most of us to figure out someone’s name.

Jennifer wraps me up in her arms and we breathe into each other’s skin for a moment. Her scent has always been an ancient remembrance for me, like a rare bottle of rich oils excavated from a forgotten city.

She introduces me to her new friends and takes stock of our bags, articulating clear guidelines for success in our joint venture. “We’ve never traveled together. We value our individual privacy. I have no idea what you do with horses. I know this trip is important to you. I’ve got your back. Let’s do this.”

Jennifer has very detailed rituals for flying. We board and find our seats and I touch her shoulder to get her full attention.

“Listen, I love you, and I may appear perfectly fine on the surface, but leaving the farm freaks me out. I need you to make sure that I’m eating and sleeping and telling the truth when you ask how I’m feeling.”

“You’ve never asked for anything, so when you asked me to come with you, I knew it was important. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you. And flying scares the shit out of me.”

I grab my phone and take a photo of the two of us before the plane takes off.

Leading with anxiety is incredibly powerful, like tapping into a vein of energy that is capable of powering a city, yet we’re often unsure how to harness such a vast, renewable resource.

Hysteria, nervous temperament, shrill, dramatic, fragile, moody, bossy, irrational—these labels have been used throughout the ages to make women question their emotions.

Sitting next to Jennifer Walker during takeoff reminds me that vulnerability, too, can be a powerful force of nature.

|| Chapter 7 - coming Thursday)

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Thank you for taking this journey with me every week.

Our paid subscriber gathering is going to be later this month and it will double as our online journaling workshop. Tell me about the days and times that work best for you September 24-30. You can leave a comment here or you can catch up with us (and write alongside us) in this chat thread.

The September calendar is slim but you can access it all here.

I’ll be back next week with exciting disclosures and big choices in Chapter 7. I didn’t plan it, but the timing couldn’t be more spot-on for the week leading up to our wedding.

And 7 is my number.

Thank you for being here with me.

Love,
Kim