So, This Happened

The draft post I’d originally written for today was eaten. I changed a page before the text was saved and voila! The post vanished. Unrecoverable. Unsaved you see.

So this is an event I suspected might happen long before this. And it is telling.

My post was about how my nerves are bowstring taut with the incessant demands of moving house. A process that started in earnest several months ago is now in process in earnest. If you catch my drift.

So this type of mistake was inevitable. Annoying as hell and time-consuming. But it is the very thing that happens when the mind and body are overloaded. The message is that it is time for a time out.

I have a small, handmade banner in front of me while I work on this blog every day. It asks: “What do I need right now?” It is more helpful than I thought it would be when I taped it on my bookshelf.

Reading it forces me to check in with myself and take a minute. Make a cup of tea, maybe. Pop outside for a breath of fresh air. Basically, anything to move and change my position.

Stress always did a number on my body. My shoulders would creep up to somewhere just below my ears. My back muscles would become tight. I remember an exam period bursitis that cropped up as regular as rain under my scapula.

The bursitis presented as a hot and painful spot midway down my right scapula after sitting in exam rooms for days. That likely seems quaint. Writing exams in the days when we actually “wrote exams.” No multiple choice tests or computers allowed. Take-home exams always amused me but they were not as easy to muster as I originally thought.

The research problem I always had was “”When is enough?” If that wasn’t enough pressure when writing papers, it was hydraulic trying to cram all you knew into an exam you had to hand in 72 hours after receiving the questions.

I was about 6 or 7 when my Nanny tried to teach me knitting. After working away at knitting and purling on her scrap balls of yarn, the stitches would get so tight, I couldn’t continue my square. Nanny would have to take the needles away from me to loosen the tension so I could start again.

An early symptom of the what I’d later come to understand was post-traumatic stress. Stress management has been a lifelong obsession. Years of yoga, meditation, deep breathing exercises and talk therapy have helped. Somewhat.

But like most humans, I have limits and I am encountering them full-on lately. Part of a healthy stress response is knowing what to let go of and then learning to let that go. That is so much easier written than done.

So what I need right now is to chill. Have that cup of tea. Maybe go for a short walk. Bye bye for now. The next few weeks are going to be a bit of an uphill slog. As I’ve done countless times before, I’m going to hold on and see where this adventure in moving lands me.