Being stressed out is like some sort of awful adult rite of
passage that we weirdly glorify in our society. If you’re not stressed out, you’re clearly not trying hard enough. But if
you’re too stressed out, you clearly
just can’t hack it and are failing. Everyone talks about balance, but everyone casts a wide array of judgments
based on projected stress level. It's a Catch 22 kick-in-the-teeth, is what it is.
In the college years, stress was my life blood. I didn’t
feel it, it just fueled me. I ate it for breakfast AND second breakfast. I’d say things like, “No pressure, no diamonds!” as
I got myself involved in every extracurricular, never said no to a
social engagement, clawed my way ahead academically, took on side jobs, and ran
myself around, taking in everything I could, for 22 hours a day (only pausing
for naps, often in the shower). I would burn down the hours in a flame
of glory, rise up from the ashes, sputter about and tackle it all again. Like most foolish youths, I was “unstoppable” and unfazed by
life’s little tensions. I kept my stress caged away in one little knot at the base of my neck and carried on.
Even in the years following, stress worked differently on
me, and it was great. But the older I get, the more my once beloved friend
seems to be turning on me. Adult stress is different. I’m less worried about
how I might change the world, and more worried about how I’m going to afford to
retire. Instead of getting anxiety over the screaming child on an airplane, I fall down this worry rabbit hole - what will happen to me if I don’t birth any wee shrieking
beasties of my own? Who will pick out my nursing home when I’ve gone senile? Will
I just eventually die fat and alone and be found weeks later, half-eaten
by wild dogs, just like Bridget Jones warned me? Worse yet, if I do somehow end up
with a spawn of my own, what if I DROP it?!
The stress of my younger years was driven by me, to force self-improvement and make
me strive to be better. The stress of today has gone from beautifully abstract
to practical, and yet largely irrational. Once laughable little inconveniences can now build up in strange ways. And it’s bloody well exhausting.
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| Business-casual? #AmIAdultingRight The blazer makes all things possible. |
The other day, before hosting a large group of friends in my
tiny apartment for a Wine & Cheese party (so adult), I just randomly
started crying. My confused co-host attempted to comfort me (bless his heart)
and asked what was wrong. As silent tears flowed, I sputtered how I didn’t want to talk about it. Why?
Because grapes. I had burst out
crying over the thought that we might not have enough GRAPES for the party. The
most trivial thing had caused a total breakdown. Grapes were of course
just a smoke screen for the larger anxiety spiral - fear that I’d somehow fail
astronomically hosting, burn the house down, cause all my friends to
abandon me and my boyfriend to leave because no one wants to be with the
hostess with the leastest, death, eaten by wild-dogs, etc. It all escalated
rather quickly.
Spoiler alert, several
people brought grapes. We had more than anyone could possibly need - an excess.
The grape surplus was such that we could have doubled our wine tally by
harvesting the juice from all the bags of grapes we had. Everything turned out just swell. Grapes for all!
The moral here is pretty simple: calm the heck down, they’re
just grapes. Life is just a bunch of frickin’
grapes.
- Sometimes your bundle will be bountiful, other times you won’t have enough
- Sometimes things change for the better (wine) and sometimes for the worse (real raisins don’t dance and sing Motown music – I’ll never forgive the lies)
- Sometimes you’ll have to make choices (red or green, we all know the answer)
- There may be a point where everything seems to be rolling around in opposite directions, while you chase about and try to get everything back together - because you know if you lose track of one thing, you’ll step on it later and it’ll squish and be awful
- A lot of the time, there are outside factors that can impact prosperity (I live in Wisconsin; grapes, like humans, don’t naturally thrive in the frozen tundra); they're beyond your control, just make the best of it
- Some days are sweet, some are sour; Some days you just want to foot stomp that shit
But don’t let all the little things stress you out, dear friends. Keep
your eye on the bunch, that big picture. And draw out as many skewed analogies as possible from
this world while you can. Go dance until those grapes become wine and live the
damn dream, because you deserve it, you adult, you!
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| Take THAT, sour grapes! |
What's the most ridiculous adult stress you find bothering you?
How do you handle those rolly-polly grapes?
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