June: a year in stress

It was a year ago today, in the month of June, that I came to understand the impact stress in my life was having on others as well as myself.  Façades had recently come crumbling down and I could finally see exposed the undisguised trauma I was inducing, especially as something significant and lasting, and no longer as ephemeral bursts of mutual frustration.  It was not just a personal pressure that was crushing me, but was hurting people around me.

Stress could have been a useful measure of the viability of my then-current behavioural practises, but rather than flowing with the pressure it applied to teach me what was working and what definitely wasn't, I simply resisted it and tried to force my way through, dragging others after me through the storm.  It left me exhausted and in emotional ruin, and others too.  I treated it like something temporary and situational, something borne of the context of my present that would disappear once I advanced further.  Bear with it, and I would be free eventually.  But because it was the result of my own behaviour, taking the best things in my world for granted while I struggled vainly in vanity, I think we can all safely say it would have followed me no matter where I ran to if I didn't recognise it and correct my behaviour.

It's not like there weren't excellent signs.  I suppose the signs all seemed a little muted to me in my condition.  They lacked the force and the clarity of consequence to guide my perspective in the situation.  I didn't attend to them carefully as I should have, like driving down a road, following your own GPS and ignoring the road signs that suggest danger, a cliff ahead.  I should have read those signs posted by others carefully.  I shouldn't have underestimated their gravity because they weren't in extra bold font or in bright red octagons.  Their magnitude was subtle but visible.

So, it was a year and a week ago today that I finally broke, when the consequences and untenability of my reactions became increasingly apparent and I could finally see and understand what was going on around me in terms of my long term responses to stress.

My solution to the stress in my life, that I called the Ottawa approach, came in several parts:

• Devise a clear list of priorities in my life, and don't let lower ones trump higher ones, this to cure indecision stress
• Allocate time every week to do nothing but reflect, and save my mind from being overwhelmed from constant stimulation.
• Realise that if two options are sufficiently comparable in quality that it is hard to decide between them, then it doesn't matter which I choose, as I cannot predict the future: flip a coin and happily follow whichever (even for major life decisions) (I no longer need to flip a coin).  This helped me overcome my requirement for meaningful causality in.
• If an endeavour in life is resulting in unreasonable amounts of stress, scale it down.  I want to have controlled ambitions that aren't self-destructive or harmful to others, so achieving an 80% in a course is preferable over a 90% if I'm happier under the 80%.  This helps challenge perfectionist tendencies.

While it's proved effective since, my solution came too late for the life I wanted to save.  By then I had depleted others' good will, neutralised sentiments which once seemed indefatigable, lost trust (a difficult reality to accept when being trustworthy is your ideal), left unintentional bruises (not physical), and exhausted them in so complete a way I couldn't imagine it beforehand.  Losing trust is hard, because with it I lose the opportunity to rectify mistakes and demonstrate change and my ability to react well to problems, relegating unexplored possibility to the haunting domain of nightly dream invariably accompanied by waking to the same immutable reality.  It's hard because it leaves one virtually powerless to address it.  And so it makes a good lesson, an enduring reminder and warning against the threat of uncontrolled stress and other, various past mistakes.

So hello June, once a month for untempered celebration and now a sombre reminder of what matters and lessons hard learned.  Welcome back, I suppose.  Let's have a kinder time of it this year, and ever more.