No 8 – A Story of Great Nervousness

Inside me: a flurry of raw energy.

There is an on-switch. A palpable moment when my nervous system wakes up and charges forward like a wild child — screaming, yelling, jumping. Pure reaction. No warning. No plan.

A common trigger is a shame-laden thought.

A sheer blouse in an important situation — I know, who does that — but it has happened to me. And suddenly the thought appears: I am dressed inappropriately.

Shame strikes like lightning. It enters my body with force, spreads hot through my veins. Suddenly I’m flushed, sweaty, shaking. Then come the thoughts about the sweat. And the cycle begins again.

Another familiar scene: the start of a vacation. Everyone is ready, and then one thing is missing. People rushing around, that dreadful sense of everything that could now go wrong.

This isn’t my nervousness. It’s my grandmother’s.

The panic of leaving. The fear. The pain of goodbye. Not knowing if you will ever return. Unbearable tension. Fear of the unknown.

That energy is still here — even when we are “just” leaving for a family vacation.

Another story — not mine, yet deeply embedded in me — is family gatherings.

The family I have today is full of warmth and kindness. But the family my grandmother had to sit with at the table was different. Violent. Abusive. Manipulative. Deeply traumatized.

Unspoken secrets hung in the air — and a mother’s attempt to make unbearable tension feel safe enough for the children.

At every family gathering, I sense a trace of that old threat.
A vigilance. A quiet activation of my own self-defense system.

The most recent — and most intense — on-switch was triggered by an exciting work commitment. High responsibility. Extensive preparation. A lot of anxiety.

I was all in: planning, organizing, shaping everything to make it exceptional.
And it was.

The cost: two weeks with a completely overstimulated nervous system.

Once I’m on, I’m on.
Highly productive. Focused. Relentless.

But I can’t find the off-switch.
I’m nervous — constantly.

So what do you do?

I’ve always thought of myself as a relaxed person. And I can be — when the day starts and ends that way. I can spend an entire day in bed, reading, calm, free of worry. I can also spend a whole day moving — cleaning cupboards, running errands — active, yet relaxed.

But as soon as an appointment approaches that carries weight.
A public moment.
Something that holds the story: This has to be good. I have to deliver.

That’s when it starts.

Ironically, I’m never nervous once the event begins.
I always deliver.

But before?
That’s the hard part.

And still, I don’t want this to hold me back.
I want to keep choosing what’s new and exciting. To step further outside my comfort zone — not retreat from it.

My first instinct is always to get rid of it. Fast.

So I go to the gym, trying to burn it off through movement and effort. But it doesn’t work.

Then I try to meditate.
Almost impossible when nervousness is rampaging through the mind like a feral toddler. I can’t hold onto a single sentence of the guided meditation. Everything slips away.

So no — pushing it away doesn’t work.
And hiding isn’t an option either.

This nervousness, this old, raw energy that enters my body like a poisonous fluid, wants to be seen.

So that’s what I do.

I sit with it.
I invite the nervousness to be fully present.
I become the room that can hold it — without judgment, without urgency, without needing it to disappear.

And as I sit and keep holding the space, something shifts.

Not because I force it.
But because I allow it.

Eventually, the nervousness settles.

Not defeated.
Not erased.
Just seen.

• What does nervousness feel like in your body when it first arrives — and what thought usually invites it in?
• When nervousness shows up, do you try to move it away, outrun it, or quiet it? What happens when you simply let it be present instead?
• If you imagined yourself as the room holding this energy, what would change in how you relate to it?