Apparently stress is not very good for you. I’d certainly heard that before but never really put much stock in it. It would probably sound crazy to say I liked stress or I enjoyed having a lot of stress in my life, but I guess I kind of did. I was good at it. If you were having a crisis of some kind, for example, I was definitely the girl have around. I’d be the one who stayed calm and thought of solutions instead of freaking out and not knowing what to do. I’d give people small tasks so they had something to focus on other than whatever the crisis was. I’d make a plan, be comforting and try to make sure that everything was going to be okay. Even when I was in high school, adults suggested careers for me like Emergency Room Doctor.

What people didn’t see, of course, was that after the crisis passed, I might be a sobbing quivering mess or – more often – laid up for days with crippling abdominal pain.  During the crisis, though, I was aces. I liked being good at something. Also, being able to relieve people of burdens that caused them to suffer or that they lacked the skills or strength to easily deal with at that moment in their lives was rewarding. It’s actually the reason I became a lawyer: to help vulnerable and marginalized people get access to justice. As a domestic violence attorney, all my clients were in crisis.  Helping them get protection from abuse was an extremely fulfilling job… and a busy one.  With the exception of periods of travel, my whole adult life has been busy. Whether juggling work and school and clubs and social justice projects or business-owning, lawyering, parenting, Girl Scout troop leadering… you get the picture.

I think that being really, really busy and under a lot of stress and pressure made me feel like I was doing something. One of my biggest fears is meaninglessness – the idea that I could be born and I could live and I could die without having really contributed anything to the world while I was here. Does it even count as having lived if you don’t make some kind of positive difference in the world?  Even if only in the world of the people who are close to you? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions.  All I know is that I want my life to have had purpose. I want my life to count.

I was recently looking through some journal entries from the weeks just prior to my heart attack.  I don’t recall much about that time, but apparently I was having difficulty handling all the different stressors in my life. I described feeling like I was being swaddled like a baby, cloth tightly wrapped around me so I couldn’t move; the pressure coming in from all sides keeping me still and motionless. I also compared the feeling to that of Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels.  In the beginning, when he lands on the island, he falls asleep on the shore.  When he awakens, he’s been tied down to the ground by a million tiny little ropes. Individually, they would not be challenging for him to break, but in the aggregate they keep him pinned to the ground so effectively that he can’t even turn his head.

I’m thinking that was probably a pretty unhealthy level of stress, no?  Perhaps I only thought I was good at stress, but really I kind of suck at it.  My heart certainly seems to have had an opinion on the matter.  One thing I know for sure is that I am not good at avoiding stress and I am even worse at relaxing.  I’ve tried numerous times in my life to get a hobby, going so far as to buy all the relevant supplies, etc. Each time, I have failed to become a hobbyist. To be honest, I usually never even opened the packaging on whatever supplies I purchased. It just seemed like a waste of precious time.  Heck, when I was a teen and young adult, I thought that sleeping was an infuriating waste of time!

So how does one relax?  The Buddhist meditates and is a gamer; my kids do art and music; but what should I do?  I’m in something of a forced retirement from pretty much everything I used to do, so I’ve got some time on my hands. I guess I start a blog. 🙂

What do you do to relax?  Have any tips or tricks you’d like to share? It’s a skill I would sincerely like to learn better.