A lot has happened to me this year. I’m trying to balance the energy I put out while flitting between career highs, a wedding I never thought would happen, a strong, sexy and stable love life, and a new closeness and tightness in my family relationships. There’s a new baby kitten. There’s money. I’m back in the big league.
Alongside life-changing good stuff has come an almost equal volume of shit stuff. I’m grieving the loss of my first and most important pet, Kimchi, a little over a month ago. I lost two really important friendships with people who didn’t show up when I needed them, or weren’t able to look beyond their own shit to help me with mine when I was in hell – so I lost it with them. I’ve been healing from a broken arm and smashed-up knee since earlier this year.
I am finally seeing signs that one day I might actually be able to have it all. Good things don’t come to those who wait. They come to those who work.
But what they don’t talk about too often when you’re winning at life is that it almost always comes with a side dish of: “God damn, why can’t things ever come easily?”
Because, in truth, I’m feeling utterly overwhelmed. I live with the perpetual fear of upsetting everyone, exhaustion and the fear of losing it all again. This year is stressful. It’s painful. And there is an ego in me that wants people to recognise that what I take on is a lot more than most.
But then I have to reality-check myself. I’m not a mother, like my sisters and best friends are, or a mother of three young girls like my own mum was. I don’t own a property or businesses anymore. I’m employed, meaning I may be incredibly busy, but I don’t carry the same financial risk I once did. Losing my house wasn’t actually so bad.
I’m not sick. With the wedding coming up, I’ve joined my local sports club. I’m working out three or four times a week, swimming, I’ve taken up badminton and am finally losing the 10kg I piled on after breaking my arm.
So why do I still feel so f**king stressed? Maybe stress isn’t proportionate to the problem. Maybe it’s proportionate to our capacity to handle it.
I’ve started thinking about capacity like a stomach that’s eaten too much food. You can train it to keep filling up and filling up until eventually you’re about to bust. My capacity-o-metre has been stretched to gut-busting proportions this year, and yet somehow the volume it is expected to hold keeps growing.
When it peaks, stress can feel like it’s taking over your entire body – because it has. The body releases hormones like adrenaline to prepare you to fight, flee, deal with the threat — even when the threat is an email, a deadline, money, grief or someone saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment.
For some people, that charge seems manageable. For others – and I am offering myself up here – it can feel all-encompassing.
The dynamics of your human experience are important here. For me, rejection sensitivity, abandonment, overwhelm and policing the “correct” way to behave, ironically, are the things that can make me fly off the handle.
And this is where my friends come in.
My real-deal friends and I have built a system that allows us all to thrive within our friendships. We really try to make sure everyone has space. I’ve always suspected that I probably take up the most room in this scenario, although – maybe, just maybe – I’m getting better.
I’m confident that what I give back to people when I have capacity is worth occasionally having to put up with me at my worst. But this year I’ve noticed that everyone seems to need a different kind of life force from one another. Everyone is having a shit time, it seems.
Between my friendship group, there have been several pets dying, money problems, parents with dementia, job losses, business losses, financial disasters, parents with cancer, elderly parents, severely autistic children, a sketchy accountant, relationship problems and a touring husband.
One friend, whose family are Lebanese, has had to watch events unfold in Beirut, while simultaneously managing a whole pile of traumatic and bananas things in her own life.
But we don’t all behave the same way in the middle of a crisis.
I can turn into a small, spoiled child. Since my mini breakdown four years ago, I’ve been re-medicated and stabilised, and I thought I’d killed off that person with this new incarnation of myself. But this year has reintroduced her. I have been very angry. I’ve hit the kind of stress where my head spins off and I spit venom.
And then there’s the part I’m least proud of: I sometimes feel superior.
I look at my stress load and then at somebody who, to my eyes, has a less conventional stress load, and I feel put out by their needs when mine seem arguably greater. I can’t tell whether this is rational, egotistical or slightly sociopathic.
I do know I’ve seen the same attitude in people running businesses, responsible for huge sums of money and carrying the livelihoods of other people in their hands: you cannot possibly understand how much I have on.
But these days I refuse to accept that high-stakes business is inherently more stressful than illness, grief, parenthood, caring for somebody or loss – although it can certainly make you act as though it is.
Stress is not a hierarchy or a competition – capacity is simply personal, and when ours runs out, whatever has filled it feels like the most important thing in the world.
The trick, I suppose, is learning that being at the limit of my own capacity doesn’t make somebody else’s limit any less real. Being the most stressed person in the room doesn’t make me the most important one.
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