What to do with a Handful of Stress

“How bad does it hurt? One to ten.”

I hate turning abstract concepts into other, unrelated abstract concepts. “I don’t know. What number is between screaming and fainting?”

“Eight.”

“Huh.” I didn’t expect him to turn that around on me so fast. I sighed and looked around, playing for a little extra time to answer. My doctor’s office was probably meant to look inviting, all warm earth tones and dark wood, but I knew it was only so he could point to different things when he asked me what color my poop was. “I guess in that case it’s an eleven.”

In the event of COOL EARTH TONES, call your physician immediately.

He wrote something down in my folder. I don’t know it for sure, but I’d bet most of my folder is notations about what a smartass I am. “Why do you think your heart is racing?”

“Because every time I come in here, I’m convinced you’re going to send me to the hospital to die.” The other half of my folder covers my debilitating pessimism.

“Why do you think that?” He smiled as he asked that, really paying attention. Curious.

“Because of that other time when you sent me to the hospital, and I thought I was gonna die.” A few years ago, he prescribed me a new medication that honestly did come close to killing me. He still cringed every time I reminded him of it.

On cue, he cringed in his rolling chair, pushing it back an inch. “You seem like you’re under a lot of stress. Has anything changed in your life recently?”

“Yeah.” Was this a lifeline? Was there actually a reason that my shoulders shrieked in blinding pain every time I lifted my arms? “I have a new project going on in my writing job. It’s exciting and wonderful and sorta terrifying, and it’s a lot of responsibility that I’m not used to on top of that. Plus, I’ve been at it for months now and it’s a secret. I can’t tell anyone about it. It’s making me nuts. And with my shoulders hurting I can’t even sleep, so I never feel rested enough to deal with all this crap.”

Maybe there was a reason.

Keeping secrets in this way is especially bad for people like me. That is, people with facial hair.

“I’m going to give you a beta blocker for when things get really bad, but my actual prescription is for you to start seeing a therapist. It’s better than any drugs I can give you.”

That seemed true enough. “Okay. I know someone I can call. She’ll take me.”

“Oh good.” A relieved expression crossed his face. “Because it is literally impossible to find a therapist who’s taking new patients. I don’t know anyone.”

Uncharacteristically, I let that pass by.

If everyone took every shot they could the instant they got it, there would be no ducks left in the world. Or general practitioners.

A couple days later I saw the therapist for the first time, and she instructed me to create a visualization of my stress that I could put away. Like making my stress someone I didn’t like in my imagination and putting them on a boat bound for a distant island. I tried a number of things, but once the boats flitted out of sight over the horizon, I couldn’t keep them from turning back around. Next, I tried changing my stress into a goblin I could murder, but goblin-stress was bitey and I couldn’t handle the guilt of being a murderer.

Endless imagination is good for writing, bad for outsmarting your own brain.

Finally, I settled on an English countryside at night, where I dug dark stress-stones out of the ground and slowly built a low farm wall around my overgrown garden. The happy thing was just how well it worked. When I felt the anxiety rise, I closed my eyes and slid another stone into the side of my knee-high wall, and instantly felt better.

Armed with my guilt-free visualization technique which allowed for me to actually build something out of my stress—and keep a close eye on it at the same time—I toddled off to DragonCon in Atlanta.

Where everything immediately fell apart.

This only looks like an English country wall. In fact it is made of stress, rendered harmless by the process of rockification. This wall is capable of safely holding decades of stress and allowing you to get the fuck on with your life… as long as you don’t go to DragonCon.

“Still practicing your visualizations?” My therapist lives a hundred or so miles away, so we just Zoom it in from her kitchen. The earth tones and dark wood are a coincidence. They must be. “How did DragonCon go?”

“No, and not great.” In fact, a few specific incidents trampled all over my tiny amount of progress and entirely blocked my ability to access my de-stressing technique. (Because my publisher invited me to go and she will be reading this, I am jumping in here to assure her that my issues had nothing to do with her. She is a fantastic human who I love unreservedly.) I told the therapist I worried about swimming too far into the deep end of my new responsibilities and letting everyone down when I inevitably panicked and fled for the shallows. Tensing, I waited to find out how this related to an as-yet undiscovered childhood trauma.

“Let’s make sure I understand what you’re saying.” She says this a lot. Her folder of me must read like a stream-of-consciousness jigsaw puzzle. “In the past you just buried these negative feelings you had, but now everything is bubbling up and creating all this anxiety. It’s affecting you physically, and you’re worried that it’s going to overwhelm you and you’ll let people down who you care about when it does.”

To be certain, my half-coherent ramblings could not possibly have communicated this thought to a non-professional, but she smashed that nail right on the head.

“Uh, yeah.” My introspection knew no bounds. “And I didn’t have any fun at DragonCon, which seems like some sort of nerd-crime.”

“Oh, that’s just because you didn’t have a specific task to keep you occupied the whole time. It’s common with introverts.”

Introverts? I am not an introvert. I love speaking in front of crowds, and meeting new people while I sell books is my most favorite thing ever. Neither one of which I did at DragonCon. Mostly I just sat in the hotel room and watched panels on the convention channel…

I decided to let the introvert thing slide too.

This is a picture of someone who sincerely believes they are not introverted.

Her face opened, kindness and reassurance taking light there in a way that my what-color-is-your-poop doctor really needed to study up on. “You’re not getting overwhelmed. Your mind has always pushed away the things it wasn’t ready to handle. The fact that these as-yet undiscovered childhood traumas…” I knew it! “… are coming to you now, just means that you’re finally ready to deal with them. Your mind knows how strong you are, how strong you’re becoming. It knows what you can and can’t handle. And when you can’t see the way forward by yourself, you’ve got me to help.”

Unfortunately, it is often much more obvious when you are NOT strong enough
to carry your load than when you are.

There was more, about love languages and how being entirely over every issue in your whole life was maybe not the most realistic of goals, and very little if anything about poop colors, but we had hit upon the real takeaway. My anxieties over this change in responsibilities really did stem from some unresolved childhood crap that I was only now beginning to deal with, because only now have I been ready to.

That knowledge brings a measure of calm with it. I do not have to panic, and I don’t have to shoulder the literal and figurative pains and burdens by myself, something I grew up thinking was my only option. My joy is working and collaborating with others, and that joy heals. The project that changed my perspective so jarringly wasn’t about me, it was about a new community of people eager to pick up their own pieces of the work.

In other words, the very reason for my stress was also my way out of it.

And the next time I reach up for the peanuts I am going to choose fainting over screaming in pain. That way I’ll at least get a little rest.

This is River in her Salvador Doggie pose,
proving my thesis that being passed out is key to a happy life.