An Ambiguous Journey

I feel stressed for no good reason and it hurts my feelings.

It ain’t easy, folks. Amiright? It. AI. NOT. easy. For the last few weeks, I’ve been feeling — as a middle-aged person clinging to the coattails of youth would say — HELLA STRESSED by this crazy little thing called life. Stress in the morning when it’s barely light out and I hear my four-year-old singing “P-I-Z-Z-A!” from his room. Stress in the afternoon when I pick him up from school and we endeavor to walk the two blocks home in under a half hour. (Spoiler alert: we never succeed. There are few things more annoying than the pace of dawdling child.) Stress in the evening when it’s time to answer the bevy of professional emails that have been piling up over the day but I’ve already eaten a weed gummy and know from experience that weed gummy-fueled emails turn out somewhere between very weird and completely incoherent. Still, rather than address this STRESS problem directly, a course of action that would benefit not only myself, but my husband, children and all other innocent bystanders, I have been fixating on this question: am I entitled to be stressed?

Take the other day, for example. There I was, sitting at my dining room table, penning my MORNING PAGES over a breakfast of cottage cheese and walnuts. (I’m this close to finishing the three-pound bag of walnuts I bought at Costco four years ago. My heart pounds at the very thought.) Morning pages, for unfamiliar readers, are an essential practice of the artiste, as designated by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way. I’ve never read the book, but everyone who’s anyone knows that if you do not do morning pages you are a fucking philistine and should probably just abandon your dreams and start studying for your CPA exam. Anyhoo, there I was, morning paging, when I glimpsed my watch and realized that in order to get in exactly 80 laps at the local rec center pool and be home in time for my virtual therapy, I had to leave immediately. This meant cutting off my morning pages at 2 and 1/4 pages even though you have to write at least 3 pages because JULIA CAMERON SAYS SO OR WHY EVEN BOTHER? Breathlessly I rushed to the pool, forgetting my Hoka slides in my haste, meaning that I had to tippytoe from the locker room to the pool barefoot, quite probably contracting athlete’s foot, jock itch, ringworm, psoriasis, and all other afflictions treated by Gold Bond in the process. Morning is peak lap swimming time, so I wound up sharing a lane with a young woman whose athletic prowess vastly exceeded my own. When I must share a lane, I do my best to seek out the company of old ladies, because they make me feel fit and fast by comparison. Unfortunately, it was just after 10am, meaning all the old ladies were doing water aerobics in the therapy pool.

After 80 laps of pure self-loathing, I skedaddled my butt home, arriving 4 minutes late to my virtual therapy session because I had to fill my 32 oz water bottle along the way and my water filter is painfully slow. After therapy, I had a chunk of time not quite big enough to get any writing of quality done before an appointment with Ye Olde OBGYN. Idly, I surfed the web, annoyed that I was wasting precious time but unsure what else to do with it. A few deuxmoi updates later, I made my way to the doctor, to get an ultrasound for a condition I apparently imagined because my ultrasound technician told me there was absolutely nothing wrong with my lady parts, that my symptoms were common of a woman my age, that they would only get worse, and pretty soon I was going to want to forgo all sex in favor of sleep. I should have felt relief to discover that a problem which already had me imagining my children growing up without a mother was in fact, non-existent. But as I waited in line to pay for my HOSPITAL parking (which seems deeply immoral) I felt nothing but irritation for my fellow line waiters. One woman could not decode the mysteries of the virtual parking meter, explaining to the rest of us “Sorry, I’m old!” to which another woman, who was similarly struggling to find the correct slot in which to put her credit card, exclaimed, “You’re not old!”. To be clear, both of these woman were old. An even older woman next to me, like CANE-wielding old, responded, “We’re all old at some point.” The age denier doubled down. “Oh stop, you’re not old either.” What fight was she fighting? I’m still not sure.

I had just enough time to pick up my anti-depressants before I had to pick up my kids, so off to Walgreen’s I flew. There, I discovered my refill was actually at a different Walgreen’s a mile away, forcing me to test the limits of space and time in order to get my hands on mommy’s much-needed little helpers before clocking back in at the mommy mill. Praise Jesus, I got the goods and made it home at exactly 4pm, which is when my husband and I leave to pick up our two-year-old, who attends daycare ON OUR BLOCK, and our four-year-old, who attends school, as I mentioned previously, two blocks away. Sensing my agitated mood, my husband suggested that we order pizza with the gift certificate given to us by a production company shooting a sitcom two doors down. I was relieved. I’d been running around all day! I needed the break that only not having to cook dinner could provide! Finally, in the moments of calm that followed, on this perfectly sunny day with spring blooms bursting around me, I took inventory of what exactly I’d achieved over the last several hours. It was only then I realized, everything I’d done that day had been an indulgence. I was a certified woman of leisure, and I had the audacity to feel stressed about it. This revelation not only embarrassed me, it hurt my feelings.

I return to my original conundrum. We’ve established that I’m entitled (see above), but am I entitled to be stressed? In my recent “self-care” readings (ie hate-listening to Brene Brown podcasts), I keep coming across the term ambiguous loss. Before looking up what it meant, I found the term incredibly stupid-sounding. Isn’t that just like, sadness? You feel bad and you’re not sure why? Why must every state of being be named and pathologized? But then I started thinking, if there can be ambiguous loss, why can’t there be ambiguous stress? After all, pathologizing normal feelings is only annoying when my feelings aren’t the ones being pathologized. And my stress is very ambiguous! Take my job. I’m a writer. I’m a writer because I call myself a writer. However, I have to write a lot of stuff that no one pays me for to arrive at something someone will pay me for. So does that mean all that other stuff isn’t work? Is a job, by definition, something you get paid to do? When I spend the day journaling and swimming laps and luxuriating on my back with my feet in metal stirrups, covered in deliciously warm ultrasound goo, on that day am I a writer? I get that all those 9-to-5ers who must arrive at work at a certain time and use Outlook and Excel and have bosses and conference calls endure legitimate stress. But isn’t the fact my career may be a figment of my imagination also a legitimate cause for stress? After all, my job may be fake but my need for money is real. It’s stressful to have a million things you have to do. But it’s also stressful to having nothing in particular anyone demands of you. Ambiguously so. And yes, as I mentioned last week, I’ve had nearly a month of visiting family members to support me so that I may do my maybe-work-maybe-hobby writing in peace. But isn’t mere proximity to parents or in-laws at times stressful for no reason in particular, again, ambiguously so? Isn’t it stressful to think you’re sick? And when you discover you’re not, doesn’t that not in fact erase the stress you felt, but render it ambiguous? Isn’t any feeling that you have no good reason to feel kind of ambiguous? And once labeled ambiguous, isn’t that enough to justify feeling it?

Any therapist worth the several hundred dollars they charge you for 50 minutes will tell you that you can’t help feeling what you feel, you can only control what you do with those feelings. If this is true, then wondering whether I am entitled to feel stressed is a moot point. And yet, out of the wondering came creation. I took a feeling that had no right to exist, and gave it meaning. I made something out of nothing, because that’s what artists do. Also, isn’t so much of therapy simply naming the feelings you’re having? And isn’t naming those feelings a first step in the healing process? If so, am I actually not just an artist, but also a therapist? And if I’m a therapist, don’t you kind of owe me money for the time you spent reading this? And if you’re paying me for something I wrote, doesn’t that make me a writer?