swallowing stress

SWALLOWING STRESS

I was always a very high strung child. Luckily for the most part we always lived out in the country and I could avoid people for long stretches of time. As I got older, and a corresponding increase in chores, physical labor along with solitude ( with books ) pretty much handled my stress. After I got married the first time, hour long jogs substituted for strangling the spouse. The exponential increase in stress with Baby Mama was harder to tame, but it gave me huge amounts of energy at work.

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I treated my displeasure with wife no4, as well as the stress from the job working for bitch bosses, by working harder and faster. As you might recall, Christmas is far from my favorite season, the joy of it taking a huge squishy from the first holiday without my kids and getting worse as retailers turned a quarter of the year into extra work for their own profit. One time I was working for Family Dollar ( may their executives be boiled alive in liquid feces for all eternity in the lower bowels of Hell ) and between all the extra crap showing up in August, and doing the managers job for her, I was steaming mad.

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Keep in mind I'm the only guy there, so I'm schlepping freight all week long, being the assistant manager on top of that, and now covering for a new manager who probably needed to get laid she was so worthless. Oh, but Jim, now we need you to hand write every single bar code, quantity ( think scores of tiny decorations ), pack it and put it all up twenty feet in the loft for storage for next year, on top of your normal duties. I was so pissed I was literally running up the vertical ladder, heavy boxes carried one handed and throwing them overhand up into the loft, while mumbling curses.

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I was in my mid-thirties, still strong of muscle and endurance. And of course, you know with that kind of temper and energy, the boss just pisses you off on purpose to get an extra man shift performance, free. That was my last job, at the food bank. Bitch boss rode me like a rabid pony, and as much as I wanted to kick her in the knee to take down her fat ass, straddle her body and put all my weight into pulverizing her face, I had to contain myself and take out my hate on inanimate objects. Even her dumb ass eventually figured out how to push my buttons for even more work, free.

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Well, by now you might be seeing the issue. You are only fleet of foot and infused with unlimited energy while young. Once you get old, not only does your job throw you under the bus ( because an aging manual worker should ease into management but now all the females hold those positions ), you can't rely on physical work to burn off the stress. I HAD to quit the food bank, not only because if I stayed I would have hurt the boss, but also because I was starting to slow down. I was huffing and puffing, and at night I was a lot more sore. It would have just been a matter of time.

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Now, even though 90% of my stress was gone along with the job, remember what I said about being high strung. Without extra exercise, what was a brother to do about stress? At first, I just wrote more, as writing was a large stress release also, for twenty years. Just vomit all that frustration and hate onto the page. And it worked for some time. But then we started seeing an unfortunate trend, or at least I did, and the economy started imploding. Now my stress was back with a vengeance. Writing until my brain hurt, then staying busy reading didn't help. I was writing and reading doom and gloom.

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And again, extra exercise wasn't an option. I worked like a mule, until suddenly ( seemingly ) one day I couldn't even do twenty percent of what I had been. And it isn't sitting at a desk for the last two and a half years. The week I quite the food bank, I was out at my place trying to take up up digging the latest hole. I couldn't do it back then. Now, granted, I can't bike every day like I used to, so biking out there I had no energy to dig. If I was living out there, I could still dig. Perhaps for fifteen minutes, half hour. If I did nothing else the rest of the day.

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I have the muscles still, but far too many years of working and biking outside in severe temperatures and I fried my lungs from the cold. Hey, I grew up in California. Even at Lake Tahoe it doesn't get all that cold. I didn't realize, until too late, what that does to your wind. Not that ignorance is an excuse with Darwin. So, time to once again relearn coping mechanisms. I needed to counteract the daily stress brought on by bad news of a serious nature ( at least as I perceived it ). I needed to do something besides studying and planning, something concrete.

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I needed to physically act every day. Something in the real world, not digital, to prepare. Even the the most mundane task, like digging another hole ( it just needs to be small, and done slowly ), or vacuum sealing something for that hole, or going to the thrift store for stockpile items. Even getting another bag or three of sugar and finding a ghetto engineering way of packing it, such as re-purposing a plastic empty coffee can.

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There are plenty of prepper chores to be done that cost nothing, such as reorganizing the basement to make more room ( at the same time making it look cleaner and more organized to please The Boss ). I can repackage items so that they can be more quickly loaded into the NOL's vehicle to bug out to the B-POD. For a half week now I've been doing something every day having to do with prepping. I never worried before about DAILY, and this isn't anything I'll regret not doing, per se, but just something to get me out of my head by doing with my hands.

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As a result, because I'm DOING instead of WORRYING, my stress level has come down to a more reasonable level. Before, I'd always been content that I was already ready enough, for whatever. Now, I suppose I have to have a version of rosary beads, something to keep my hands busy. Not to say I can eliminate all the extra stress. I can feel one of the larger disturbances in The Force here. But before I could feel the stress building up. At least now the pressure is reduced. Dammit! It was so much more enjoyable when it was theoretical.

( .Y. )

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note: JM, many thanks for the super extra generous PayPal donation.  I'm calling it a December donation, as I already added up Novembers, in ink.  Plus, it is then a Christmas gift for my extra special hair.
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