On stress

“Where do you feel it?” 

I’m in therapy now, because that’s what you do when you lose a sense of control. It’s where you go when it hurts, but it hurts anyway. Adulthood will always surprise you. 

At therapy, the therapist asks me this every time – “Tell me where the stress is” – and so I tell him it’s in my chest, to be a good student. He’s expecting me to simply express the ache, like what the tickle feels like when a lady bug’s legs meander their way up the back of my ankle and delight a pleasant afternoon picnic, or how cold and wet it might feel when a big raindrop plops onto my cheekbone and I intuitively blink and look up, as if the rain were to come from anywhere else. But it’s not tangible like that. 

If it is, I’m lying about my chest anyway. It belongs there sometimes, if our hearts could truly harden enough to crumble and feel like we swallowed a boulder that’s now lodged in our ribs, but it’s more a fiery, sludgy, cement-like lava slowly slogging through every vein, and I’m lying horizontally enough for the pain to more like float and stagnate and make me heavy rather than flow as a river from my neck to my toes. It’s a numbness, too, as the weight succumbs, that begins in my forearms – causing my wrists to limp and my fingers to twitch – and continues as a cycling of fevered panic that energizes itself as it taps every bone, yanks and snaps on every end of every muscle and then somehow manages to manifest a needle and sew my skin to whatever floor I couldn’t seem to get myself up from in time. I could lay on that cold bathroom tile or warm laundry room rug or dirty garage floor concrete, making love to my suffering, till hunger or exhaustion interfered, and even then, I’d stay sewn and bare, his simple “location of stress” enjoying a meal instead.

One time, I sunk so depressingly into the bed on an otherwise sunny Friday afternoon, not being responsible or productive or pretending for anyone for once, and I imagined the wood planks that make up my roof falling down onto me and piercing me one by one, cutting through the exhausted chest cavity holding all the stress, denting into my one face, nailing me to the couch arm by arm, leg by leg, until the entire house and all the love we built fell messy into my lap, at last making tangible the pain I try to decipher now, with my therapist every Thursday at 9 a.m. There, now you see me bleeding here, here, and here. Don’t ask me where it lives, there is now red on both our fingertips.

But that didn’t actually happen, and whatever he’s asking me to seek and mitigate is nowhere to be found or described or molded for him to diagnose. It’s lurking eagerly beyond the both of us – nowhere near this ever familiar office painted in gray, just like every other healer’s office painted in the same gray that is the antithesis of help or healing. It’s thriving instead, invisible and untouchable, in all my tomorrows and in all my intangible thoughts still mustering, and it’s playing a winning game of catch-me-if-you-can.

“Yes, I think it’s my chest,” I say matter of factly once more.

And we spend the next 50 minutes imagining together what it’s like to lift that stress ball out of my chest and ask it to leave while I simultaneously, secretly, tighten the thread to the floor. Name it what suits you, but lurking monsters can live for days, and I am always the gracious host. 

I left my first husband on a Friday, and that was the easy part. We even had lunch together and talked about the weather after we signed away a union that lasted for a little while. 

But, oh, the pangs lingered. Not because my weakness robbed me of the broom to shoo it out, but because I was too lazy to shoo in the first place. Why am I so beholden to this attention? I lugged it around until it got ahold of me, and now I’m strapped to the couch (his in therapy and mine in my house caving in.) 

Stress aches with its weight – a burden we cannot alone lift – yet it is almost always silent. Even if we do muster the energy or the courage to talk about it – to family or friends or, most often, the most distant person in your life so as to avoid judgment – it laughably isn’t even close to breaking the ice. This was my hidden talent. 

“Everything is great! Fine, the kids are lovely, how are you?” Divert attention, be impeccable. Stress can only feast in private. 

And so we find the most private environment other than the closed walls of our bathroom to break down alone, and we end up in therapy that is way too expensive, way too much gas money to get to once or twice a week, and, for me, I do my best to make conversation about him instead. 

I knew his dog wasn’t well and the renovations to his backyard and which plants he preferred in his office, both at home and at work. (Different plants for different environments, I learned.) 

I deflected enough that he was none the wiser and I was none the better. Maybe even worse? A weekly therapist visit in which we spent a good seven minutes of our fifty together having small talk was never going to cut it. 

“How do you feel now?” he closes after another session wastes away. 

“Better. Truly. Thank you, I’ll see you next week.”