Benign Fasciculation Syndrome and Anxiety

Why Me?
It's a question I've asked over and over and the longer I deal with it, the more clarity I have on the answer:

Anxiety.

What caused the onset of my symptoms was a bad fight with my sister. One of those this-is-the-end-of-our-relationship fights. (It wasn't). But that's not what caused my BFS. It goes so much farther back than that.

My relationship with anxiety started after I gave birth to my first son, in 2007. He was a really hard baby - he had cholic, couldn't be put down, and didn't sleep more than an hour at a time. I felt sick to my stomach all the time, like there had to be an answer, a fix, a solution. I always knew I wanted more children so my husband and I decided to have the second one close to the first, to, you know, not prolong the torture. At 20 weeks pregnant with my second child we found out he had a craniofacial abnormality - a cleft lip and potential cleft palate. It was like being punched in the gut. Over and over. The next several months were a torture of anxiety with doctor's visits, special ultrasounds, visits to children's hospital...all to get prepared for the baby to come. At 4 months old he had surgery. Again, anxiety thrived. He ended up being a really happy baby - he was like a ray of sunshine in our lives. That was 2010.

I won't regale you with all the details of all the anxiety producing events of my life since then. The Cliffs Notes version is this: I had boarded the anxiety train and never gotten off. 

By the time I had that fight with my sister I was underweight, suffering from severe IBS, shaking constantly from nerves and sustaining myself on coffee and alcohol. I was miserable, felt sick all the time, and yet somehow thought I had it all under control.

To be fair, at that point I had been experiencing a persistent twitch behind my right knee for about 4 months. I thought I had injured it on a run and expected it to go away. About 12 hours after the fight with my sister, I started experiencing persistent twitching in my calves. Then my thighs. Then my stomach, back and arms. I felt like my soul was a frightened bird that was trapped in a cage, flapping hopelessly to get out.

It is important for me to go back 13 years to where my anxiety started because something that suddenly breaks was working on breaking for a long time. You don't cut down a tree with an axe after one hit. It takes hit after hit after hit and then a final push. So I urge you to blur your focus on the present and sharpen your focus on the past. Where did your anxiety start? How long have you lived with it? Write it all down or share with a counselor or loved one so you can start to process.

The crazy part about BFS and its relationship to anxiety is that they go hand-in-hand. Each produces the other. It's an endless cycle. A chicken or egg. BFS made me realize I had an unhealthy relationship with anxiety so I wanted to stop being anxious but BFS makes me really fucking anxious!

And why, I've wondered, do I have BFS from some, yes, stressful times in my life, but others who have gone through way worse times than I don't have it? The only answer I can make peace with is that all of our bodies process and handle stress differently. Some of us have heart problems, or migraines, vertigo, high blood pressure, bowel problems, weight problems, traveling pain, crippling phobias, eating disorders, etc. All of these conditions are chronic, just like BFS. It's just that for some reason my body decided to choose this syndrome as its canary in the coal mine.

I spent a lot of time looking for an answer and cure. It was really frustrating to realize there is none but one - calm the ef down. In another post I'll share some things I've found that help with anxiety. Because if you want to turn the dial down on your twitches, that's the only true starting line. And at this starting line you have to face the cold, hard truth: you have some work to do if you want to live in harmony with your twitches which is the only thing that's going to make them settle down.