Urgency.

How do we arrive there? Does it take minutes or hours? Do we wait for resolution or do we yell into the void? How do we get to the other side?

There’s been a theme in the last several years of my life - urgency.

Urgency to have another baby.

Urgency to overcome my struggles with infertility.

Urgency to advocate for my health.

To obtain diagnoses that offer treatment options which could possibly improve my quality of life.

Urgency to repair ruptures and hernias and orthopedic injuries.

Urgency to remove the organs that were slowly trying to kill me.

Urgency to heal. [Over and over and over again.]

Urgency to get back to my girl, to my trio, to my life. [Over and over and over again.]

I think about Urgency a lot.

Like I thought about it last week, when I waited a good 6-8 hours past what I reasonably should’ve to go to the emergency room for a situation I did honestly continue to believe would resolve itself. If urgency had just shown up and announced it’s presence, it would’ve kicked me out of bed and into the car faster than you just read this sentence.

But it wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there, because in that moment I didn’t know my body was in danger.

Something overwrote the warning bells.

Something turned on the mute button. It silenced me inside. It shut me down.

I was looking for those warning signs - the sirens, the flashing lights, the doom is coming feeling. I mean frankly, I’m always looking for them if we’re being honest. Living in this body isn’t ever “safe” or “calm” or “quiet.”

So to not have seen them, or heard them, to me meant they weren’t there.

That I was uncomfortable, but not in agony.

That I was experiencing pain, but it was manageable.

While those things were true, my bladder was also not long from rupturing - but I didn’t know this then.

[Note + Eye Roll: That would’ve been the fourth rupture in my body in 2.5 years. Enough already]

Then, there’s the moments in which something has to be said that seemingly can’t be. The times the words are caught in my throat or its not the right moment or the right place or for whatever reason, I just can’t say them aloud, in time, to the right person. And thats a different kind of urgency - the constant heart palpitations, the passive fear, the angst building up of not having a time or a place or plan on how to say this is what’s eating me up inside.

Why is it different? Because I am the only one who feels this agonizing urgency and it’s truly slowly shredding me apart.

Why is it different? Because to me, this emotional sense of urgency presents so much differently.

There is anxiety and panic and pacing, hearts and thoughts racing, discomfort, disassociation and depersonalization, there’s survival. For me, it’s wildly different than physical urgency.

Maybe thats where it gets hard to understand?

Maybe that’s where it gets hard to break down the truth about responding to urgency?

How do we arrive at an urgent moment?

Does it take a minute or hours?

Do we wait for resolution or do we yell into the void?

How do we get to the other side from standing in front of it, to being caught in the middle of it, to being dropped down on the ground with it just narrowly peaking out when you turn around and look out of the car’s rear window?

Urgency can happen with ‘small things’ that feel big (like when I dropped an airpod down the sink drain last week, but my husband came to my rescue with a special tool he’d had handy just for a reason like this) - which STILL induced a hyperventilating level of panic for me, even though I knew at worse case, $250 could’ve fixed the situation. I just don’t have an extra $250 I’d like to devote to that cause, nor do I want to walk around with the self-imposed humiliation of what an idiot I’d been.

Or there’s the variety of times that I order or make something for dinner that my stomach decides it’s not interested in or available to consume at the time. The urgency comes from a) wondering how fast it’ll be until I’m on my way to the bathroom, b) telling whomever I’m with that I’ve mad a mistake, and c) in determining how exactly I’m going make them feel less uncomfortable by MY mistake.

Urgency can (and for me, often has) happened with big things that are almost too hard to wrap ones head around (like the fact that last year, my fallopian tube ruptured inside of my body while I was laying on my bedroom floor, and it wasn’t even the most pain I’d ever been in before. In fact, I had no conscious idea that my body was even in crisis - something in the communication chain between my brain and my body again overwrote my feelings and my emotions and the sensations I was experiencing until I was ready to face and process them after coming out of emergency surgery in the middle of the night.

Here’s what I’ve learned, or what I’m learning, or what I’m trying to grasp:

Urgency - it can be silent or shrill.

It can come alone or you may face it in a pack.

It can find you, or you can find it.

The question is, what happens next?

When do you call 9-1-1? Or RotoRooter?

When does the hard conversation happen?

When do you say okay, it’s been long enough, it’s time. and I can handle the outcomes?

When do you say I love you AND I need to choose me?

How long, how many weeks, how many months do you carry these thoughts around before you release them to their intended owners? Or at least until you share them with someone who can hold onto them alongside you?

Urgency is rough, like sandpaper that grits against a freshly painted wall. It’s a reminder, a brutal reminder that there is something behind there you covered, or that you’re trying to cover, but it’s not letting you.

Urgency is knowing how many minutes, exactly, it takes to get you into the car and to the nearest emergency room. It’s knowing at exactly which side of which intersection the car accident happened at. Urgency is reaching for the trash can the minute before your daughter throws up in your lap, not the minute after.

Urgency is panic and pain and discourse, but for some people, it can also be daily.

Urgency can be in ensuring you have everything you need before you race out of the door late for a meeting or a moment. It can be trying to speed around the truck in the left lane to get to your destination faster, but essentially bartering with your life to do so. Urgency is both things we think about, and things that we don’t.

Urgency is a construct of time.

Urgency is a feeling.

Urgency is a mindset.

Urgency is a personality trait.

Urgency paves it’s own way - and sometimes that way changes along the ride.

I think I’m trying to figure out how exactly we learn to manage it in the process.