stress is grief and grief is stress
It’s really odd(/gratifying? not the right word but it will do) when you manage to pinpoint the source of your stress. Because I don’t believe stress is ever really caused by workload or actual demands on your time but instead by some kind of emotional demand to which you’re just refusing to face up. Each time I remember that, and give myself time to think about it, I feel better and everything feels so much more achievable. There are a few questions in my ask and in the past there have been YouTube comments and messages asking me how I cope with stress and I normally say lists and doing the big things first and time management and that sort of thing but to be perfectly honest I think it has a lot to do with thinking about the real reasons you feel anxious and overstretched.
I realised today — sort of after writing that last text post but sort of after feeling that gut wrenching reaction to the topic over the past fortnight — that a lot of the reason I’m stressed is Christmas. The “most wonderful time of the year” is always a source of money anxiety, always a source of last minute panic, but then by the 25th December everything slots into place and this year it won’t. There’s no way in hell that it will. There’s not going to be the five of us around the table joined by my grandmother and my sister’s husband and kid. However many people we invited to join us (and we’ve invited a few), it’s going to be four of us, and one noticeable absence, and everyone else.
I think I’m more afraid of Christmas than I was of the funeral, because the funeral was something foreign. Christmas is familiar and this year it’s going to be wrong. And the next year and the year after that. Wrong in an entirely different way to the way in which it was wrong when my grandpa died and Christmas moved to London instead of the countryside. Wrong in a really, really empty way. I just want to get back to normal, to pretend that on the other side of essay hell there’s this perfect, whole, complete thing. But that’s me, always seeking the perfect and the whole, aiming at these huge abstract ideas that never ever manifest themselves.
“Never, never, never, never, never.”
So now I feel relief, from having realised the source of that tension, but at the same time, I feel very sad.
Back to work.
