October 2020 post 7

My husband got in a car accident today. It was his first accident ever as a driver. He was a passenger as teenager for an accident, but otherwise he has no experience with car accidents. He was embarrassed and he was shook up but he’s OK. 
The car is pretty beat up, a lot of front end damage. We’ll know more this weekend about whether or not it can be repaired and how much that’ll be. Luckily no one was at fault so all we have to pay as our insurance deductible, and we have accident forgiveness so our insurance premium isn’t going up anytime soon either.

I posted that he got in a car accident on my Facebook social media page. Within 15 minutes he asked me to take it down because he was embarrassed. He doesn’t have social media accounts. He got a text from a friend asking if he was OK. I don’t think my husband understands how much I need to discuss things when they happen. Part of how I get through my anxiety is I communicate through it. When he called me and told me he got in a bad accident, within a few seconds I felt like I was going to throw up and began to physically shake. I knew I wasn’t actually sick and it was just my nerves and anxiety getting the better of me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I had that physical response.

I’m a talker. It helps me sort through my feelings when I say things out loud or write them down and I’m able to get feedback from other people on it. My husband is not a talker, so sometimes I turn to my friends, my social media page, etc. In this particular instance I feel like I can’t really post it on Facebook, so I’m blogging about it because not a lot of people read my blogs anyway. 

I guess right now I just feel like I need to get it out. I texted some close friends, coworkers, and he told his mom about it. It helps to be able to talk to those friends. I am a slave to social media, though. To be honest, some days I just want to delete my Facebook. I like having it because I like to see what everybody’s up to, I like to see pictures my friends post, and I really like the fact that I can communicate with people who are far away, especially during this strange time. But days like today where I posted something that I wanted to talk about and I wasn’t able to because it affects him too, it made me wish I didn’t rely so heavily on Facebook for social interactions. It also makes me wish that how I navigate through my anxiety was something that didn’t bother my husband. It’s a weird position for us both to be in. He hates any and all attention, and for me it isn’t the attention but the need to discuss everything. He doesn’t even want to discuss. He wants to fix, do, and forget about it. All in silence. Ha, so the opposite of me.

He’s ok. That’s the key point here. The rest will sort itself out.