Chronic, Actually

3-minute read

I’ve probably been stressed for most of my adult life. Chronically, quietly, persistently stressed.

The kind I was very good at ignoring. We didn’t do depression in my family. Or stress. We didn’t do excuses either.

“Stop making excuses and just get on with it,” they’d say.

So I got on with it.

It’s like when you’re busy and someone knocks at the door. Tap tap. You’re busy, hurried, obviously, so you ignore it. Tap tap TAP. They’ll go away, you think. Haven’t got time for this. And then: BANG BANG BANG. And you’ve got no choice anymore. You’ve got to answer the door. And by now you’ve got a headache. And your resting heart rate is around 100.

That’s what the symptoms did. Eventually.

So I joined the bandwagon. Read everything I could get my hands on. Psychology Today. The full works on cortisol, adrenaline, hormones. Food. Rest. Sleep hygiene. Adrenal fatigue. Gut health, because apparently your gut has opinions about everything now. The gut-brain connection. Cold water therapy. Journalling. Gratitude practice. Magnesium supplements. Nervous system regulation.

Why does any of this actually happen to a person?

The vagus nerve is very fashionable right now. Looked into that too. Box breathing. Then, clearly feeling that wasn’t quite enough, I moved on to Buddhism. Yoga. Shiatsu. I actually trained in shiatsu, so I was very thorough about that one. Got a hobby. Took up tennis, which I will say no more about except that the matches were... an experience. For everyone present.

I tried them all. Might help. Can’t hurt. Methinks.

And yes, I am aware that just reading that list is slightly exhausting.

And thanks to what I’d begun to understand about how experience is really made, about who I am underneath all the noise, things had genuinely started to shift. I thought I was getting somewhere.

Then one evening I was standing in front of the open fridge pondering the evening meal. Heart misbehaving. Going properly wrong, the way it does when I’m being my rushed, hurried self, which, let’s be honest, is most of the time.

And a whole new layer arrived. Completely uninvited.

My mother.

Just her. Being my mother. Doing all the things she always did.

“Hurry up, we’re late.” (you’re so SLOW = BE FASTER)

“Come on. You can do better than that.” (TRY HARDER = BE BETTER)

“You’ve got to get some qualifications.” (= BE SOMEONE)

“If you get this thing done, nice and quickly now, come along, BE a good girl.” (good people get things done EARLIER than not-so-good people)

And me, small, on the stairs:

(Ooh, Mum’s home. Better hurry down.)

I might get a kiss and a cuddle. Never stopped hoping. Gotta be fast or she’ll be straight back out the door with the dog. Dinsdale his name was, the undisputed true love of her life. A dog, like Mirò, who had no qualifications and wasn’t remotely bothered about it.

I wasn’t working any of this out. Wasn’t thinking it through. It just arrived. All of it, at once.

And I saw it.

Not as a problem to solve. Not as a wound to heal.

I’d been living as the label. For sixty-odd years, filling in the sentence without knowing I was doing it. I am stressed. I am behind. I am slow. I am not enough. I am just like her. Running on automatic, passing itself off as me. As my actual, unalterable identity.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you, and I say this a little shyly, because it sounds almost too simple: we are not the words we hear or the words we say. We are the one before the words begin.

I am not my mother. I am not (ANYTHING I want to put in this bracket), actually.

I just am. Full stop.

And in that moment at the fridge, call it clarity, call it consciousness, if you will, I saw it. The whole elaborate construction, built on thought, mistaken for truth, mistaken for me, for the whole of my adult life.

When you see that, really see it, not just nod at it, the misunderstanding clears all by itself. You don’t have to do anything to it. You can’t, actually. That’s not how this works.

And then it just stopped. The rushing. The urgency. The whole thing.

And I laughed out loud. I mean, I was standing in front of a fridge. How fast was I planning to go?

And what came next surprised me.

A feeling of immense relief and spaciousness I hadn't even known was missing just came over me. Like something I'd been unknowingly holding on to had simply... gone.

Freedom is too grand a word. It was a fleeting glimpse of it. More like, oh. Oh.

And then, quite suddenly, I felt exhausted. Properly, deeply tired. Which made perfect sense, actually. I’d been running that particular race for sixty-odd years. No wonder my body had something to say about it.

The fridge is still worth pondering. My heart has stopped knocking on the door. But that particular urgency, the one I’d been carting around for sixty-odd years like very sensible hand luggage?

Turns out it was never mine.