Stress: The Toxic Elephant in the Room

Sometime in my teen years, I attended a family reunion in Ardmore, OK. I remember it because what I saw there would somehow be the landscape for my dreams. There was a walkway outside the building we were in that would wind you around in front of a beautiful estate - at least that’s how I remember it. My daydreams about the future would often take place there, behind the 3 car garage, imagining a safe embrace of a husband and children that would thrill my soul in hopes of the future. It was a young girl’s fantasy, but also it was very peaceful. That peace has drawn me back a lot lately. The answers to my future questions are bustling around in the other room putting breakfast together. They are beautiful and more thrilling than I imagined. But managing this life is harder than I thought. More than that, the world that I find myself in today, is nothing I ever imagined and it’s turning out to be a lot harder to bear than I thought.

How are you handling things? I know many people aren’t even talking about it. Usually, there are two types of people right now. The advocates, who are really vocal about what they view as the problem or the Everything is Fine bunch who are just trying to hold it all together, hoping, pretending everything is fine. And honestly, I feel myself hopping the fence from one category to another when really, something else needs to be said.

The stress of what has been happening the last year and a half is toxic. The stress we are all collectively enduring is toxic. You can go argue all you want about who is to blame, but in the mean time, we are feeding on toxic fumes of chaos and mayhem. Ask any of your local teachers and they will tell you how worried they are about the mental health and safety of their kids. Violence is up. Suicide is up. Self-medicating in all kinds of forms is up. Marriages and relationships have been put to the test and many, sadly, have failed. The stress of our current state of affairs is something none of us were prepared for. It’s time we all said it out loud and admit it.

My baby is 4 1/2 which means I’m 4 1/2 years past my last pregnancy. How many years does it take to lost baby weight? It feels like it shouldn’t take that long. And truth be told, I’ve had a lot of healing to do since I carried that giant of a child (10 lbs) at 37 years old, but despite all of the healthy eating and extra moving I’ve been doing, the improvement isn’t obvious to anyone else. If I know ANYTHING about myself, I know the issue at hand is stress. I’ve never handled stress well and currently trying to manage stress of the entire world on top of my own ADHD homeschooling, housekeeping reality isn’t really working. The whole overthinking problem that’s always been there has been lit on fire and exploded onto the current climate of society. That little realm of things I can control -like the health of my body- hasn’t really been attended to. I have years of experience eating healthy and exercising so I know how to do that. I’ve never mastered chronic stress and certainly never experienced such an onslaught of different kinds of stress not letting up.

Last week’s post, Hope: The Missing Ingredient, was the beginning of this conversation that we need to have about stress. Like in an emergency, everything came to an emotional standstill a year and a half ago as we all held our breath. But as things have played out, we stayed mentally in the emergency place (for obvious reasons) and in some ways forgot about where our direction should actually be coming from. We never moved past fight or flight. Today, though, I’m trying to move on. I don’t mean that there aren’t needs or emergencies in our lives. I mean our society as a whole has a little (or a lot) of PTSD and needs to start dealing with it.

Writing this all down is my way of trying to move the stress out of me. I don’t know what works the best for you, but I want to encourage you to find it. So many of us don’t know how to constructively deal with stress and now we have a generation of children needing those skills more than anything! Unless we, as adults make space for our mental health, there will be no one to teach them. Exercise, sports, art, reading, construction, gardening, singing, there are a million things a person could do, but they likely won’t unless they recognize the value it brings to their life. As a wife and homeschooling mother, I have far too many things filling up my time to justify blocking out hours a week to write UNLESS I recognize that without it I might not be here to fill those roles in the first place. All manner of physical and mental health issues are directly affected by stress. ALL of them. With the current climate of the world (as in the world has gone crazy), we aren’t able just suck up and manage. Find and do the things that you love. In the midst of the hardships we are all facing, make that sport or hobby or quiet creative time a priority every week.

Let’s all admit that we’re struggling (I sure am!) and do better this week.

“Let us hold resolutely to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to spur one another on to love and good deeds. Let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit, but let us encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

Hebrews 10:24