Welcome to Zombieville. Where We Survive while Internally Frozen.

A description of living in a hyper-freeze nervous system response.

I recently spent four frozen days in the Deep South.

The early fall temperatures were actually lovely. Highs in the low 80s and lows in the high 50s. Ideal enough for me, I popped open many of my windows.

Yet, I found myself frozen in a chair, playing Suduku and listening to Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra series, unable to travel the five feet into my office to work on the stuff that needed to get done.

A day of this type of zone-out doesn’t worry me. It looks and acts like a system reset. I’ve come to understand that it’s one of the ways I relax and give space to the stuff puddling in the back of my brain to do its work.

These four days were different. By day three, I knew I’d again found myself in Zombieville.

Here’s the weird thing about Zombieville: from the outside, it looks like I’m doing OK. I made all my appointments, I held space for others, and the pile of dishes in the sink didn’t get any worse than usual.

During those four days, physically, I stayed armored. Armoring is when the body gets locked into the preparation phase of a fight or fight response. I think of it as being stuck at the starting blocks of a 100m race. I didn’t realize how ready I was to run until my feet, which spent most of the day up on the recliner cramped.

During those four days, mentally, I lived in full-on avoidance mode. Unless I met with someone already on my schedule, I wasn’t contemplating anything resembling work. Whether that be stuff around the house or stuff on the professional front.

During those four days, emotionally, I shut down. Even as I listened to some of my favorite stories, I skipped past sections fraught with tension or sadness. I didn’t even consider reaching out for help.

I had once again made myself inaccessible to the world. As I say it now, it feels hyperbolic even as it rings true.

I was ready to run or fight for four days straight. It was exhausting.

And it reminded me too much of how I lived in my twenties and thirties. Every day felt like day three.

When it was all over, and I started cataloging my most recent experience, here’s what I noticed.

Zombieville is not relaxing. Despite how it might look from the outside.

Zombieville is not collapse. It’s sitting on the starting blocks for hours, waiting for some unknown thing to happen. I could do what had already been scheduled. I couldn’t plan new things. I couldn’t reach out. I couldn’t do anything but sit and wait for the next thing to drop.

From the perspective of nervous system activation states, it’s the sympathetic nervous system in hyper-freeze. Another name for hyper-freeze is tonic freeze. I remember the tonic part of that label because it feels just as I’d imagine soda in a can would feel if it was shaken every time it started to calm down.

Zombieville is a safe enough place to survive. It’s bloody hard to grow while you’re there.

Zombieville is a weird mix of over-preparing, hitting performance targets, and self-enforced detachment.

The irony of my last five years of training to hold space for others is that of the four activated nervous system responses, fight, flight, hyper-freeze, and hypo-freeze (collapse), hyper-freeze was the hardest for me to grasp.

The reactive nature of fight and flight appeared often with folks in my circle of experience. The rolling with it like water, like a hypo-freeze (collapse), could easily be seen in a different group of folks. And, I couldn’t wrap my mind around the frozen preparedness of tonic freeze.

I couldn’t imagine living in hyper-freeze because I had lived it for more than two decades and hadn’t yet managed to label it.

Clinically, I have no idea what’s written in my charts. All I know is that my experience doesn’t seem to be well documented anywhere. Bits and pieces of many experiences fit mine. They don’t, however, click in a way that says that fits.

So, I’ve included some of what I noticed about how I experienced Zombieville. It’s not meant to be prescriptive. Instead, the list below serves as just one example of how one common-looking white woman experienced a 20+ year tonically frozen system. This experience is also influenced by an attachment style dominated by avoidant tendencies, a function-focused approach to survival, and working in a male-dominated industry.

Elements of My Experience of Surviving while Internally Frozen

• I appeared successful. The outward trappings were there to be seen, including a good job, an appropriately sized car, and fluid spending of money.
• I was busy, kinda of. I spent long hours of work. There were periods when I had significant social commitments. Yet I couldn’t keep my living space tidy, and I’d lose whole evenings and weekends to variations of listening to an audiobook and playing Sudoku.
• I was polite, amenable, and angry all the time. While my body likely told a different story, my behavior (except when on deadline) defined accommodating.
• I had a small circle of friends. I could only maintain two or three close friendships at any given time, and they were varying degrees of shallow. The folks in that group changed over time.
• I could not create social connections. Those friends accepted me when I chose to join a group or do an activity with explicit social obligations.
• I wasn’t available for romantic connections. (This may be more due to my attachment approaches.)
• I wasn’t writing much as I didn’t really have a burning need to say anything. The world was happening around me, and my emotions only connected to that which reinforced my loneliness.
• I lived armored 24/7. Cut off from my body’s experiences, I totally didn’t notice. One of my exes suggested that sleeping with me was like sleeping beside a warm log. Bodyworkers could get parts of me to relax for a couple of minutes, but never feet.
• Exhaustion could have been my name. I slogged through every moment of the day. In hindsight, I can’t begin to calculate the energetic expense of holding the armor in place while moving around the world.
• My relationship with sleep was un-nuanced. I didn’t want to go to sleep. Yet once I was asleep, I was committed to doing it forever. Getting out of bed in the morning is like trying to convince a tree to move.
• At the deepest levels of Zombieville, I couldn’t connect with animals. While I wanted to pet them, the “sucker” label they all now see across my forehead was missing.

So, if this sounds like your experience, know you weren’t and aren’t alone. There are ways out of Zombieville. It takes dedication, grace for yourself, and a wee dram of hope.

If you know folks who might be experiencing this, please share this article.