Your Daily Dose of Joy

Wherein I Allow the Stress to Eat me Alive

I’m at a place where I can physically feel the stress boiling in my blood.

I recognize that this is likely not a healthy way to feel, so I try to do things like take deep breaths and entertain going to yoga or going for a walk.

But instead I create reality indexes about fictional White House communication directors and freak out that my friends might secretly hate me or that Gentleman Caller doesn’t seem excited enough to see me or that I didn’t do this one thing at work perfectly enough and am thus going to get fired or that my parents think I have weird sexual fetishes because I accidentally suggested we watch Caligula together before I really knew what that movie was about.

I had a particularly bad freak out earlier this week when I felt like every single driver on the road was purposefully driving slow in order to keep me from my destination and then got mad at Gentleman Caller because he didn’t want to watch the movie I wanted to watch (note: this was not Caligula, I learned my lesson).

The stress monster was taking over my life and emotions and sabotaging my relationships. The stress monster was eating my soul. The stress monster had me replying to totally benign texts about sending out baby shower invites with multi-page rants about how I AM GETTING TO IT and TEXTING ME ISN’T GOING TO HELP and THE BABY ISN’T GOING TO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INVITES ARRIVING TWO DAYS LATER. The stress monster wouldn’t let me adapt from TOTALLY SOLID PLANS to adhere to the schedules of others.

The stress monster was, frankly, a bitch.  

So this morning I decided to kill the stress monster. I’d like to say that this was some sort of Taylor Swift-style revelation that happened while I was watching the snow fall and noted that each snowflake is unique and delicate and has the ability to both soothe the soul and destroy the best laid plans.

But instead of writing a poem about snow and killing monsters, I took a look in the mirror, thought back over the last two weeks and realized that I didn’t like this person. I didn’t like the racing pulse and the unwillingness to compromise. 

Goodbye, stress monster, I stab you through the heart, I take away your life source. Consider yourself vanquished.