Loose Threads

Sometimes I get the feeling that overwhelm... or rather Overwhelm, comes in waves. There are days and weeks where I am just ticking along nicely. I have a good little system in place, getting shit done and still taking time for me and then... it starts to creep up on me... this feeling of malaise... or something. I've gotten behind on some things... didn't get the vacuuming done on the weekend... or whatever. And... I sense the Overwhelm lurking in the bushes, ready to leap out and consume me.

I'm not entirely sure that it is Overwhelm... perhaps it's the fact that Covid cases are going up in our neck of the woods. We've been pretty protected, living on Vancouver Island but now... there are several cases in a number of local schools... which means it's now spreading in the community. On top of that, numbers are going up in general - across the province, across the country, across the world.

And everything just seems harder. Picking up my PC Express grocery order on Friday was a hassle. My window was 8 am to 9 am. I had other errands to run and didn't want to go too early (8 am) because then I'd be sitting around waiting for the other stores to open at 9 am. So I showed up at 8:30 am and learned that there were 6 people ahead of me. I ended up waiting 45 minutes for my order to be brought out. The guy apologized... they had had some people call in sick and were short-staffed and had a tonne of orders to get prepped... and, there you go... the best laid plans go out the window.

And then... there's the local grocery store which doesn't have online orders so apparently allows people without masks to shop there. People who don't seem to see the need for social distancing either... [Although that has now changed in the last week with mandatory masks!]

And this gets repeated at Bulk Barn, Rexall, Home Hardware and a number of other shops... I sometimes think that perhaps I have too many errands to run... but... some things can only be purchased in these places. Perhaps I just clump too many errands together in one day... maybe I should split them up over the course of the week and go out every day? No... that doesn't seem like a good idea either.

We've been reading a book called Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski and they talk about the Stress Response. That, when something happens that triggers our fight/flight response, our body goes into a stress response... and while we might not fight/flight... the stress response is still there. And it need to be completed otherwise it gets stuck. Every encounter with a naked-faced person in a grocery story is a moment of danger... they might have Covid. Every errand is a foray into the wild world in which I might encounter someone who has Covid. I can try and talk my brain out of this alertness but... it knows better than me. It knows that danger is danger and reacts accordingly.

I'm beginning to realize that I can't just shake off these moments... the stress response gets stuck... I need to walk, run, move when I get home. I need to talk about it. I need to cry. I need to write. I need to release the stuckness. Otherwise this is what happens, it builds up oh so slowly and manifests as overwhelm. It's not so much the overwhelm roller coaster or the Covid roller coaster... it's the stuck-Stress-Response roller coaster.

It becomes challenging to just get up on a Monday morning and keep on going... as if nothing has happened. Because things are always happening and I am never quite releasing what has happened. Or if I am... that release happens in waves. I release some of the stuckness and then am ticking along again nicely, ignoring the small annoyances/dangers and their associated stress response until... it gets too much again.

So... really... it's not the overwhelm that I need to handle... it's not all of the little unfinished to-dos on my list... it's the pent up anger, frustration, fear, sadness, disgust at the events that have happened over the course of the last few days/weeks/months. Be they related to potential Covid dangers or to other things... the heat pump remote that isn't functioning as it should... the never ending rain that keeps me cooped up at home... the aftermath of the US election results...

While I started this post thinking it would be about all of the loose ends that are niggling at me... it's turned into something much deeper and more real. Everything is upside down with this virus. Going around, pretending that everything is just fine is part of what ails us. Things aren't fine. We aren't fine. We are having our emotional buttons pressed repeatedly, day after day, by things as simple as going into a store. Activities that were safe before Covid are no longer quite so safe. Our brain knows this... even if we resist it. But resisting just keeps us stuck.

And so... I walk... I journal... I breathe... I meditate... I write... I talk with others. I work at releasing the stress responses... and try not to let them build up. But... I am clearly still in development with this.