On vertigo, muumuus, and the myth of control.

Surrendering to the spin.

I awoke just as sunlight signaled morning; the bedroom was slowly swirling counterclockwise. The sensation was deeply unsettling, like my body was moving forward and my mind backward, unable to choose a moment to settle into. I closed my eyes and opened them again, hoping for a reset, but unlike when I had experienced a similar sensation after too much wine or weed, I couldn’t focus my way to stillness. I felt a bead of sweat lazily trail into my ear, and realized my whole body was drenched. My tongue felt like thick, cold-pressed, watercolor paper, instantly absorbing any and all traces of moisture.

I swung my legs to the floor, but the ground felt like sand in an hourglass. “Relax, I’m okay…I’m okay,” I lied to myself, collapsing back onto the bed. I woke Jason. He helped me to the bathroom, handed me water. I peed, drank, and then – projectile waterfall all over the floor. Nausea and panic washed over me. My body was in full revolt.

Local urgent care didn’t open until 9am. Jason’s hand stroked my leg gently. I barked orders at him between dry heaves. “Call your mom! Bring me a cool rag! Get the kitties out of here! Should we call an ambulance?” He moved with calm precision, fixing what he could. I flailed and felt the contrast between his calm and my need to control.

Life always has a way of reminding me: I would have to allow. I learned this from parenting, but also from painting. The early layers can feel so off that my first instinct is to paint over the whole thing and start again. But if I resist that urge and let the mess breathe, give it time, step back for a new perspective, the work finds its way. Life is like that, too — it reminds me that control was only ever a story I told myself. Allowing is the truer work, staying with the mess long enough to see what it wants to become.

So I tried to stay with it, despite my worsening dry heaves. I turned to prayer, a practice I’d recently welcomed back to my life. “Living Spirit of the Universe, I am grateful you’ve returned my spirit to me this day. Please protect us…protect me.” The words hit a nerve. Asking for protection meant admitting I couldn’t hold it all together by myself.

We called my mama. She suggested ginger tea and allergy meds. Allergy meds? I eyed the cats sprawled at the foot of the bed — my beloveds, but also the source of my stubborn, low-key allergies.

As I waited for the Claritin to settle, I tried to follow the spiral, seeing if I could catch up to her. But, like all the cycles of birth, growing, aging, and loss, she continued to loop endlessly. I tried breathing exercises. Maybe I didn’t need to stop the spirals after all. Maybe they were carrying me somewhere I needed to go? Inhale, hold, exhale, hold.

Slowly, I drifted into shallow sleep, and when I woke, the spinning had slowed.

✦

By the time Jason returned from taking our 12-year-old, Ida, to school, urgent care had opened and would offer, I hoped, some additional insight as to what was happening. I told him to go into my closet and pull something that I could throw over my nighty, like a muumuu. He disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle that is my closet, and I imagined him lost in there, himself now dizzy, forging through three shades of every color and pattern in the universe.

Now dressed, Jason helped me up, and I walked behind him, holding onto his shoulders, like the Human Train game from kindergarten. I rested my cheek against his back. I could feel his warmth through the texture of his waffle shirt. For a moment, I let myself lean into him fully, surrendering to the comfort of him as we choo-chooed our way outside.

In the driveway, I vomited again, folded into the passenger seat, hands instinctively resting across my lower belly. Every bump on the road jostled me into fresh waves of nausea and flashbacks of bumpy roads on the path to give birth to Ida, maybe the last time I felt as vulnerable as this. Childbirth had taught me that some thresholds can’t be controlled, only allowed, and now here I was again, reminded of the same lesson on a different road.

Jason wheeled me into urgent care. Sitting with eyes closed, I was wearing the outfit that he had curated: hot pink muumuu, bright orange house coat, light pink velvet ballet flats – wild, even for me. I felt like a crazy old lady. The muumuu’s voile fabric clung to my damp legs. ‘Maybe no one will see me if I keep my eyes closed?’ I thought. Object permanence be damned.

The doctor examined me: eyes, ears, balance. “Looks like vertigo,” he said. “Most people will get vertigo at least once in their life. For most, it usually goes away on its own after a few days, though it can last longer. There are exercises you can do to help…” he continued. “It comes from tiny crystals behind the eardrum, dislodged.”

Spirals, crystals, drums — even my ailments were turning out to be woo woo. The nurse gave me a tiny anti-nausea pill. ‘Put it under your tongue,’ she said in a soft, Slavic accent, pointing beneath her own tongue. “Tastes like grape candy,” she added with a knowing nod. I flipped from feeling like a crazy old lady to a nine-year-old. I did as I was told, and the too-sweet, artificial taste filled me with a brief surge of comfort, reminding me of the Hubba Bubba I used to stuff in my mouth as a kid, three pieces at once, back in simpler times when three pieces of bubblegum could solve all of my problems.

When Jason wheeled me back out to the hall, my mama was waiting, her cool fingers combing through my short curls. Comfort, smallness, safety, and more nausea.

✦

Back at home, I crawled under our sea-green linen sheets. Linen is always the right temperature. The cats crept in to check on me, curling close, proving yet again that their cuteness outweighs the sniffles and itchy throat they leave in their wake.

Lying in bed, I traced the curve of my belly, the place where so much of my becoming had been written. This moment felt like a loop where past and future meet, where I’m both young and old, in control and out. I wasn’t just 45-and-a-half, not just a mother or a daughter or a crazy old lady or a kid who loves grape-flavored Hubba Bubba. I was all of it, spiraling, curving, and coiling around the days that shape me, like water shaping hills. What carries me through isn’t control but trust — that even when the ground beneath me gives way, when sea and sky trade places and nothing holds, disorientation can be its own direction. Surrendering to the spin is what steadies me — trusting, even as the room tilts, that the picture is still coming together — if I can allow it to.

We love Justina’s reflections on “surrendering to the spin.” But in practice, surrender can be hard work.

Or wait — if surrender is hard work…does that mean you’re working too hard??!

Dizzying paradox, we know. Surrender, acceptance, letting go — whatever you want to call it — is definitely one of those try-not-to-try mobiüs strips of wellness that can challenge even the most mindful among us.

While we don’t recommend episodes of vertigo (and we don’t think Justina would, either), some other varieties of spinning can actually help release control. For example, cartoonist / teacher / certified Macarthur genius Lynda Barry recommends drawing a spiral as a meditative, embodied practice that can quiet the thinking mind and help us to reconnect with our innate, childlike creativity.

Already calm and creative? Go the classic route and rewatch Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Did you know it was the first film to use the dolly zoom to create that disorienting vertigo effect on screen?

If all else fails, you could always watch a spin cycle — available in a convenient 10-hour video format, just in case your laundry’s already done.

Hope your Sunday is more twirl than tornado.