What's in your "I Can't Handle" Bucket?

Last night, I was standing outside the ambulance as my 13-year-old daughter was being loaded into the back, and it occurred to me, “I’m handling this.” My teeth were chattering, my heart was racing, but I was handling it. Doing the next needed thing. Stating her birthdate, listing her allergies. Climbing in and holding her hand, even as mine was sweaty and trembling.

This was on my mind because it was just a week ago that I was telling my coach, Living Well Pod guest Missy Maiorano, that “medical emergencies” were something I could not handle.

Missy was sharing what she calls the “I Can’t Handle” Bucket, explaining how our brains make up stories about the kinds of things we are and are not capable of enduring, and then categorize imagined scenarios and outcomes — “yes, this is okay,” “oh no, I must never experience that.” We tend to spend a lot of time and attention worrying about or trying to prevent the things that get tossed into the “I Can’t Handle” Bucket. It can be a heavy load to carry.

I used to have a lot of gastroparesis-related things in my bucket. I couldn’t handle… if I needed a feeding tube. If my symptoms got worse. If I lost ten more pounds. If the condition never went away. But what I’ve seen in the last 22 years, both personally and from watching thousands of other people navigate this condition, is that… we do. If or when those things come up in real time, we handle them.

During our session, Missy went on to say that if we dig just a tiny bit deeper, we find that it’s not really the circumstances themselves that feel unbearable — it’s the feelings we expect to experience as a result. Uncertainty, loss of control, terror, helplessness, panic, grief, despair.

That feels true to me. Because in reality, I’ve handled a lot of medical emergencies, serious life-threatening ones — both my own and my daughter’s. And yet, my brain has continued to insist that I have to monitor and watch and predict to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again because it was terrifying and I cannot handle terror.

Guess what? I was terrified last night (see: trembling, sweating, palpitations). But unlike in the past, that felt… okay? Not good. Not comfortable. But also not like a problem. I don’t know how to describe it any better than that, but it made a significant difference to just let the terror be there as I put one foot in front of the other and did what needed to be done. It felt like a little weight had left my bucket.

And when I look back at the last two decades of my life with gastroparesis, the same is true. At some point, I became less afraid of the despair when it showed up. Less resistant to the inherent uncertainty of an “idiopathic” diagnosis. As I stopped being so certain about what was okay and what wasn’t, my whole experience of gastroparesis got a heck of a lot lighter. I no longer felt like the characters in Star Wars, trying to keep the walls of the trash compactor from closing in.

One thing I know for sure is that we are all so much more capable and resilient than we think. That’s evidenced by my daughter, who is thankfully doing well and resting comfortably next to me today, and it’s evidenced by the fact that you and I have both made it through every difficult, scary, uncertain experience we’ve had — regardless of what we thought we could handle.

So, I wonder what’s in your “I Can’t Handle” bucket that you maybe don’t even know you’re carrying around. What has your brain said you have to brace against and prevent at all costs, and what is it that you’re really trying to avoid? Because it seems to me that lightening the load starts with just looking at what feels heavy and seeing what it’s really made of.