My focus has been the main casualty of my stress. I'm a reader who can't read more than memes, a knowledge worker who's coasting, a thinker who gets sucked into Tik Tok so I don't have to really think about anything. It doesn't sound physical but it feels that way, like my brain just doesn't have the ability to fire all the right neurons at the right time. It feels like it's tired and heavy and could use a year on the beach.
I don’t know where to begin with this other than I feel very seen and very sad all at the same time. I’ve noticed I’ve had to go back to practices that helped me weather PTSD diagnoses and treatment and while I thought it was mostly postpartum anxiety again (although whew should we even start to talk about how exhausting being pregnant in this societal soup is), I think it’s also just all of this. Cracked teeth, yes. Insomnia, yes. Intrusive anxious thoughts and images before bed, yes. Bone tired fatigue, yes. It’s better than it was when I was pregnant but it’s there. Im struggling with it and I literally research how stress becomes biologically embedded. I am a cortisol scientist. And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures. Maybe it’s too pessimistic, but I’m focused on surviving on my individual level and trying to fix the societal structures for my kids because I don’t know that I’ve got the longevity to benefit from that change without also doing intense individual survival self care
"And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures."
Yes, I agree. My depression and anxiety has gotten so out of control over these past two years that my psychiatrist and her pharmacist prescribed me a BOOK (along with a low dose of fluoxetine to at least make the suicidal ideations go away) because they ran out of ideas and medications to try! So far it seems really promising, although I am only 44% of the way in, so I can't verify if it's going to work either short or long term. (I haven't gotten to the practical applications or meditations at the end yet.) It's written by a doctor and the idea is that I have to break the habit of being myself because my current autopilot is that I'm basically living focused on awful past events and dreading future events instead of creating in the present. Instead of dread, I need to conscientiously envision a future where everything works out. It's more than hoping for better - it's about changing the way I behave to be a map to the future, if that makes sense.
There's a whole spiritual aspect to it, too, that I'm trying to wrap my head around...I think about how some of the most disenfranchised people also have the deepest connection to spirituality (whether in the context of a traditional religion or not). I don't think that's an accident - their spirituality isn't a casual hope that things might get better, or a belief that they could get better, but a sense of knowledge that they definitely will. And this isn't just individual, but communal and societal.
I need to continuously repeat these individual mindset changes as survival self care in order to have the longevity to benefit from the societal changes that will come.
I would caution you to be very careful about Joe Dispenza. He misrepresents his expertise and education (he is not a medical doctor or neuroscientist, much less an expert in quantum physics), promotes pseudoscience, and focuses on selling very expensive workshops and retreats.
Yes, the last thing I want to do is promote what I call "the guru effect" - where a person gets venerated as a human savior and their followers proclaim that their method is the only correct one and that if it didn't work for you that you are the problem. I also dislike all of the capitalism that comes with these gurus - pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for my exclusive products!
With every teacher, there's good things to take from them and other stuff to ignore, including Joe.
I couldn't even read it. I had an undertreated autoimmune disease before COVID. Likely had COVID in Dec 2019 after my husband returned from a trip to Wuhan. Can't prove it, the tests didn't exist then and the antibody tests weren't invented for another 10 months. Likely had Long Covid, ineligible for the specialized treatment center due to lack of positive test. Had multiple doctors prove their humanness (i.e., massively drop the ball) during this. The docs directly affected by COVID - ENT and psych - were the only ones who were ON. Everybody else just kind of floundered around...just like the CDC. Now I function at 50% pre-COVID. Thanks for letting me overshare. Now I think I can read it.
I have an autoimmune disease, Lupus, that had been in remission for 10-years until Covid. I've been dealing with flare ups off and on since the summer of 2020. It's been really rough.
I had undiagnosed Cushing's disease (rogue brain tumor that causes overproduction of cortisol with all the joy that high steroids cause) for nearly a decade when 2020 hit, and I guess for me the silver lining was that it intensified my symptoms so much I actually got sent to an endo who properly tested me so I finally got treated. It's famously rarely diagnosed (suspect I know why.) None of my doctors took me seriously when I said that something was wrong. I WAS dieting and exercising and kept getting fatter (hair falling out, BP going through the roof, insomnia, etc.) but when I said there was something wrong, they told me the problem was that I was...fat. Told me I was being unrealistic, not telling the truth, needed to get "serious" about the obesity, and then we could worry about my chronically elevated white blood cell counts and the weird hump on the back of my neck.
The lesson: high cortisol makes you fat, and doctors don't listen to fat people, regardless of what else might be going on. All the symptoms on this list are high-cortisol responses and I bet you dollars to doughnuts there's a secondary lack of treatment because doctors don't take fat people seriously.
Jesus H Roosevelt Christ. I'm sorry you had to go through that, happy that you finally got a dx.
I lived with a lot of stress for many years - underpaid, student loans and credit debt, poorly treated depression, relationships, toxic workplaces, all the everyday stuff. Gained a total of 80 pounds through it all, and started searching for answers 20 years ago. I'd found some of the early articles showing that high cortisol causes weight gain well before it was in popular self-management books, but that didn't offer any practical changes, just knowledge. It wasn't until I saw a naturopath almost a decade ago that I finally had any medical professional take my claim of "stress" seriously.
Thank goodness you found someone to take you seriously! My (former) PCP kept telling me to "manage my stress" for years because I was headed for a stroke and to this day I don't know what the hell she was expecting me to do. A week after I had the tumor removed, my BP dropped from 160/110 to 115/75 on half the meds. It's been just over 3 months and I've lost 35 lbs without even trying. Cortisol is POWERFUL!!!
I don't have Cushing's disease, but I also had doctors ignore me when I mentioned I thought high cortisol could be behind my weight gain and other symptoms. It took over three years before I found somebody who took me seriously and did the simple blood test for high cortisol. I'm so sorry you had to go through this and that doctors let their internalized fat-phobia run amok.
Thanks! Sadly my experience isn't uncommon, and it only took me 6 months of testing to get referred to a surgeon. A lot of Cushies struggle for years because their labs aren't "conclusive" for a diagnosis...docs expect every single cortisol/ACTH to be high, and if they're not, or you don't have every single possible symptom, you're told that you don't have it. I actually had a pretty easy ride once my endo accepted the possibility that it was a tumor...but he was trying to rule it out so he could prescribe weight loss medication. I'd already had a failed sleeve gastrectomy so he was actually more diligent in looking to rule out Cushing's than the bariatric center that did the sleeve. They tell me that Cushing's is one in a million - but I strongly suspect it's often missed because doctors don't see beyond the weight gain, and can't get their heads around weight gain as a symptom, and not a character failing in a patient. It's infuriating.
I'm glad you found someone who listened to you! In another timeline I'd love to be a doctor and be one of the good ones. They are so desperately needed!
Amen, Sister. Amen amen amen. We’re collectively traumatized but then treated as if our suffering is an individual problem to solve. This is why I feel our model of mental healthcare (I’m a therapist) will be insufficient to address the need and demands of this time - I’m not sure this model has ever been sufficient. So I’m trying to start community healing groups starting with groups for teachers. We need to relearn and reembody our innate capacity for compassion and learn to skillfully apply it to ourselves and everyone around us. Lighten the load by caring for the load together. Create decidedly depatriarchified spaces of healing. Because even the mental healthcare models are patriarchal and neoliberal. But, man. The road ahead is long and the challenges to community healing are great. We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We’re so socialized to hide suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences. We’ve dropped off a cliff in the ability to connect through compassion. My mom has never talked about her magical marriage, her beloved mother or us, her kids. She says these things are so precious that she needs to keep them close. I wonder at social media - are we exploiting that which we should hold preciously close? and in that conditioning ourselves to never share a burden? I hope people - helped greatly by essays such as yours, AHP - will start to see the need for healing and pursue a truly healing lifestyle.
"We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We're so socialized to suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences, We've dropped off a cliff in the ability connect through compassion." YES yes yes.
I hear you, see you, same, same, same. Will I ever be able to sleep through the night again? Or at least for 4 hours straight? TBD! Not to make light or it but as I said to my sister-in-law, menopause is absolutely outrageous.
Yes you will sleep better after its done…. There is a light. I slept like crap from about the age of 40/45 (part of it was the snoring going on next to me) until I a. Got over the menopause symptoms and b. Gave my hubby a room of his own. It makes a huge difference. I was about 58-60 before it all really settled down.
I'm 41 and terrified of menopause. Just having female hormones and reproductive organs has been difficult enough on my brain and body. I shudder at the thought of it getting WORSE.
My friends and I are so angry that NO ONE TOLD US what we were up against. My mother surely didnt talk about it. My (male) doctors never of course did. I had a female doctor for a little while, and she gave me some hormone replacement for a few years and also Lunesta to help with the HORRIBLE falling asleep issues. I am so glad there are places like this where you can at least get information from actual people who have had a variety of experiences. Read up and arm yourself with information. Perimenopause starts causing weirdness far earlier than you would expect. I remember when I was around 40 driving home from my sisters place 4 hours away and getting this really strange tingling/flushing sensation. I thought I was having a heart attack or something. Someone not long after that said- oh that is called a power surge. What the actual F. On the other hand, not having your period is freaking amazing. So its not all horrible. Lol. Hang in there! Find your tribe you can get through it with. It helps. I am now 64 and while there are other annoying things going on, you really do find yourself during that time. And you dont put up with a lot of shit from anyone once you have gone through it all. You got this!!
Yeah, I'm simultaneously worried about perimenopause while also dealing with ovarian/endo problems that will probably no longer be an issue once that happens (hallelujah). I have some older female friends that talked about some aspects, but they don't have preexisting mental health problems like I do. I already have mood swings, insomnia, and brain fog, please don't make it worse!
It is one of those things that is so individual- you just dont know what will happen. Literally one day at a time is all you can do. Have an open dialogue with your friends if you can, find out their coping mechanisms? Identify yours? I had coaching around disordered eating at that time, and it was tremendously helpful as an extension to the rest of my body relationship too. One of the biggest things I used to get through hard moments was- your thoughts are just thoughts, they are not your truth. It became a mantra some days. I hope you can find ease in the years to come with this
Your point about telling yourself “I have it so much better than most” really resonated. I have three kids under 9 who were home from March 2020 through January 2022 all while my husband and I worked full time from home. BUT! They did online school beautifully! My mom, a retired elementary teacher, came and helped tutor them! We didn’t have to leave our bubble! We even moved to Florida one winter! No one got sick! We didn’t have any high risk conditions! Our income actually increased! How could I possibly be stressed or complain? And yet, heartburn, palpitations, tingling in my extremities, acne, headaches. The list goes on. I was extremely stressed for all of it and I think I only started to realize it when the kids when back to in person school in January.
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Someone once told me that there is a theory that the generation who raised the Greatest Generation (think King George VI) died in their 50s and 60s because they lived through WWI, a pandemic, the depression and WWII and the stress of those things compounded to actual poor physical health, and if you look at the generations before and after, those people mostly lived until their 80s or longer. I think about that a lot these days.
Woah, you are probably onto something...all of my great grandparents (born in the 1890s) died in their 50s and 60s. My grandparents seemed weirdly "old" culturally by the time they got into their 50s and 60s but most of them lived decades longer. This was probably a reaction to their parents dying in their 50s and 60s. My mom turns 68 tomorrow and people consistently think she's at least a decade younger and I still don't think of her as a senior now.
I have been a voracious reader of literary fiction and nonfiction since I was a preteen. Then the pandemic — my husband has an organ transplant so the risk for him just keeps increasing as our society takes fewer precautions. We live in a very red place. And I can’t read this way anymore. I listen to romances when I exercise (thank you CS Discord for all the recs). I read a couple of newsletters, try to manage 1 piece in each New Yorker which I promptly forget. I miss my books so much but I just can’t focus.
I really appreciated this piece for its acknowledgment that the pandemic -- with all of its stressors -- is not really over. I am so tired of folks suggesting that it is, that we can just go back to normal, as though there is still a "normal" somewhere out there, as though our lives -- and our bodies, really, the world -- have not fundamentally changed.
Thank you for writing this. I'm exceptionally lucky in the grand scheme of things, but between the pandemic and being a biracial Black person in Minneapolis, I was carrying a lot of stress. I felt like my body was in revolt. I started snoring, had more frequent migraines, developed a noticeable amount of grey hair (I'm in my late 20s), and gained a significant amount of weight (which isn't bad, just not something I'd experienced before). I felt fairly certain stress was the culprit early on, but I had just started living with a pretty terrible (now-ex) boyfriend. He told me I was lazy and stupid for gaining weight, often saying, "It's just calories in, calories out. It's not hard." (I wish Maintenance Phase's latest podcast existed at the time.) I started believing my boyfriend. I hated my body and tried to punish it into compliance. Instead of turning to my favorite low-stress and stress-relieving workouts (yoga, walking outside, paddleboarding) I did a lot of intense cardio and ate like a bird. This seemed to stress my body more, but my boyfriend said I simply wasn't working out or dieting hard enough. When I talked to folks and mentioned that I think stress might be behind the changes in my body, I was told it was more likely the cheese I ate or that I didn't do crossfit.
I'm not all the way symptom-free now (*looks at world chaos*) but since I broke up with my boyfriend in November and moved out, I haven't had a migraine and it seems like I've stopped snoring. And not that weight is an indication of health, but I'm back at my pre-pandemic size. Looking back, I really regret how much time I spent hating and punishing myself for a normal reaction to stress in a very stressful time. I regret ignoring my own first instinct about the root of my symptoms and instead let other people's fat-phobia and body shame take over. I hope that through this collective experience, we can change how stress is recognized and treated.
This piece and your question on Instagram gave me the idea, if not the permission, to actually stop and notice what was going on in my body. I cannot believe how many things have changed in 2 years, and it’s saddened me to identify with so many symptoms from your list; small shifts that I hadn’t even taken the time to acknowledge. Thanks all for sharing them
I attributed my own hairfall to a delayed reaction to four surgeries in 2018-19 & the anesthesia required for those, plus an 11 day stay in ICU.
Looking back, it was most likely due to the stress of isolation. My husband retired in 2019 & then all of our travel/fun-life plans evaporated in 2020. We were stuck at home together. My favorite person became my co-prisoner.
We learned to give each other space. He’s a news junkie & I had to go lock myself behind a closed door to avoid the barrage of information about trump & the pandemic. (At least he watched MSNBC & PBS & not Fox!)
We saw no one-adult kids stayed away to keep us safe, (they worked with the public), our groceries were curbside pickup. I talked to friends on the phone occasionally, but we all felt the same way. The fabric of our daily lives was ripped-with no one to see, safely.
Pre-vaccine was unbearably lonely. I read a lot, rediscovered sewing & quilting to pass the time. I bought a used electronic keyboard & practiced sight reading sheet music for hours. We both gardened, played with our cats. I paint & have dozens of unframed canvasses stacked in my art studio. I have started taking long drives alone just to get out of the house. I gained 35 pounds.
It’s hard to be 66 & lonely. I am double vaxxed & double boosted, but with sub-variants on the rise, I do not go anywhere without a mask, which gets me dirty looks in our town. I do not want to risk long-Covid, my autoimmune conditions are bad enough already. After the school shootings last week, I despair that things will ever get better in our nation. It is all so damn depressing.
I am looking for a therapist, but no one has openings for new patients. I made an appointment for mid-September. I will persist at surviving. But just barely.
I relate, I'm also 66, recently retired, living with my boyfriend who has chronic medical conditions and believes that if he got COVID he would become seriously ill. If it was up to him, I wouldn't even go to the grocery store. We are fully vaxxed and boosted, and I believe that social contact is part of maintaining my health. He gets extremely anxious if I suggest that I meet friends for dinner.
I was assuming that by now the Omicron wave would have retreated to where I could make plans to go to hear music and see people, but instead we are hearing of still more waves to come. I have an annual checkup with a new PCP this week, I actually marked on my "pre-appointment" questionnaire that I sometimes feel depressed. I am hoping that he will "prescribe" regular social connection.
I am very fortunate to have excellent health, have had no physical manifestations of stress, except for weight gain. But I do frequently feel like I'm losing my sanity.
I hope you are able to get in to see someone. Therapist friends have talked about the challenges of seeing patients (especially new ones) through zoom--it works for some. I think we are meant to be social and be with people but it is still so hard to balance that with being safe. Take care.
I have been to numerous doctors over the past few months trying to figure out why I just felt WRONG and BAD all the time seemingly out of nowhere. They couldn't find anything physically wrong with me and just shrugged. Today's piece was like, OH NOW I GET IT. It's sort of a relief to know it's probably not some mysterious undiagnosed illness...but in other ways it's even more terrifying because what do I actually DO about it?
It’s been covered before but: so many people go to the doctor and they say “You need to take time off work and rest” - but it’s simply not an option. I’m not talking about reluctance to take PTO, I’m talking about the *inability* to take PTO. When “taking time off” means losing your job, income, and health insurance…you simply can’t. And it’s fucked!
My focus has been the main casualty of my stress. I'm a reader who can't read more than memes, a knowledge worker who's coasting, a thinker who gets sucked into Tik Tok so I don't have to really think about anything. It doesn't sound physical but it feels that way, like my brain just doesn't have the ability to fire all the right neurons at the right time. It feels like it's tired and heavy and could use a year on the beach.
THIS!!!!
Indeed, THIS!!!!
I don’t know where to begin with this other than I feel very seen and very sad all at the same time. I’ve noticed I’ve had to go back to practices that helped me weather PTSD diagnoses and treatment and while I thought it was mostly postpartum anxiety again (although whew should we even start to talk about how exhausting being pregnant in this societal soup is), I think it’s also just all of this. Cracked teeth, yes. Insomnia, yes. Intrusive anxious thoughts and images before bed, yes. Bone tired fatigue, yes. It’s better than it was when I was pregnant but it’s there. Im struggling with it and I literally research how stress becomes biologically embedded. I am a cortisol scientist. And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures. Maybe it’s too pessimistic, but I’m focused on surviving on my individual level and trying to fix the societal structures for my kids because I don’t know that I’ve got the longevity to benefit from that change without also doing intense individual survival self care
"And while we need, NEED, the collective healing and restructuring I think we also need the individual life savers in the meantime because I don’t know that our bodies can survive waiting for societal structures."
Yes, I agree. My depression and anxiety has gotten so out of control over these past two years that my psychiatrist and her pharmacist prescribed me a BOOK (along with a low dose of fluoxetine to at least make the suicidal ideations go away) because they ran out of ideas and medications to try! So far it seems really promising, although I am only 44% of the way in, so I can't verify if it's going to work either short or long term. (I haven't gotten to the practical applications or meditations at the end yet.) It's written by a doctor and the idea is that I have to break the habit of being myself because my current autopilot is that I'm basically living focused on awful past events and dreading future events instead of creating in the present. Instead of dread, I need to conscientiously envision a future where everything works out. It's more than hoping for better - it's about changing the way I behave to be a map to the future, if that makes sense.
There's a whole spiritual aspect to it, too, that I'm trying to wrap my head around...I think about how some of the most disenfranchised people also have the deepest connection to spirituality (whether in the context of a traditional religion or not). I don't think that's an accident - their spirituality isn't a casual hope that things might get better, or a belief that they could get better, but a sense of knowledge that they definitely will. And this isn't just individual, but communal and societal.
I need to continuously repeat these individual mindset changes as survival self care in order to have the longevity to benefit from the societal changes that will come.
I'm mightily curious to know what book you're talking about!
"Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza!
I would caution you to be very careful about Joe Dispenza. He misrepresents his expertise and education (he is not a medical doctor or neuroscientist, much less an expert in quantum physics), promotes pseudoscience, and focuses on selling very expensive workshops and retreats.
Thanks for letting me know.
Yes, the last thing I want to do is promote what I call "the guru effect" - where a person gets venerated as a human savior and their followers proclaim that their method is the only correct one and that if it didn't work for you that you are the problem. I also dislike all of the capitalism that comes with these gurus - pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for my exclusive products!
With every teacher, there's good things to take from them and other stuff to ignore, including Joe.
I couldn't even read it. I had an undertreated autoimmune disease before COVID. Likely had COVID in Dec 2019 after my husband returned from a trip to Wuhan. Can't prove it, the tests didn't exist then and the antibody tests weren't invented for another 10 months. Likely had Long Covid, ineligible for the specialized treatment center due to lack of positive test. Had multiple doctors prove their humanness (i.e., massively drop the ball) during this. The docs directly affected by COVID - ENT and psych - were the only ones who were ON. Everybody else just kind of floundered around...just like the CDC. Now I function at 50% pre-COVID. Thanks for letting me overshare. Now I think I can read it.
I have an autoimmune disease, Lupus, that had been in remission for 10-years until Covid. I've been dealing with flare ups off and on since the summer of 2020. It's been really rough.
I had undiagnosed Cushing's disease (rogue brain tumor that causes overproduction of cortisol with all the joy that high steroids cause) for nearly a decade when 2020 hit, and I guess for me the silver lining was that it intensified my symptoms so much I actually got sent to an endo who properly tested me so I finally got treated. It's famously rarely diagnosed (suspect I know why.) None of my doctors took me seriously when I said that something was wrong. I WAS dieting and exercising and kept getting fatter (hair falling out, BP going through the roof, insomnia, etc.) but when I said there was something wrong, they told me the problem was that I was...fat. Told me I was being unrealistic, not telling the truth, needed to get "serious" about the obesity, and then we could worry about my chronically elevated white blood cell counts and the weird hump on the back of my neck.
The lesson: high cortisol makes you fat, and doctors don't listen to fat people, regardless of what else might be going on. All the symptoms on this list are high-cortisol responses and I bet you dollars to doughnuts there's a secondary lack of treatment because doctors don't take fat people seriously.
Jesus H Roosevelt Christ. I'm sorry you had to go through that, happy that you finally got a dx.
I lived with a lot of stress for many years - underpaid, student loans and credit debt, poorly treated depression, relationships, toxic workplaces, all the everyday stuff. Gained a total of 80 pounds through it all, and started searching for answers 20 years ago. I'd found some of the early articles showing that high cortisol causes weight gain well before it was in popular self-management books, but that didn't offer any practical changes, just knowledge. It wasn't until I saw a naturopath almost a decade ago that I finally had any medical professional take my claim of "stress" seriously.
Thank goodness you found someone to take you seriously! My (former) PCP kept telling me to "manage my stress" for years because I was headed for a stroke and to this day I don't know what the hell she was expecting me to do. A week after I had the tumor removed, my BP dropped from 160/110 to 115/75 on half the meds. It's been just over 3 months and I've lost 35 lbs without even trying. Cortisol is POWERFUL!!!
Good luck on your journey!!!
I don't have Cushing's disease, but I also had doctors ignore me when I mentioned I thought high cortisol could be behind my weight gain and other symptoms. It took over three years before I found somebody who took me seriously and did the simple blood test for high cortisol. I'm so sorry you had to go through this and that doctors let their internalized fat-phobia run amok.
Thanks! Sadly my experience isn't uncommon, and it only took me 6 months of testing to get referred to a surgeon. A lot of Cushies struggle for years because their labs aren't "conclusive" for a diagnosis...docs expect every single cortisol/ACTH to be high, and if they're not, or you don't have every single possible symptom, you're told that you don't have it. I actually had a pretty easy ride once my endo accepted the possibility that it was a tumor...but he was trying to rule it out so he could prescribe weight loss medication. I'd already had a failed sleeve gastrectomy so he was actually more diligent in looking to rule out Cushing's than the bariatric center that did the sleeve. They tell me that Cushing's is one in a million - but I strongly suspect it's often missed because doctors don't see beyond the weight gain, and can't get their heads around weight gain as a symptom, and not a character failing in a patient. It's infuriating.
I'm glad you found someone who listened to you! In another timeline I'd love to be a doctor and be one of the good ones. They are so desperately needed!
Amen, Sister. Amen amen amen. We’re collectively traumatized but then treated as if our suffering is an individual problem to solve. This is why I feel our model of mental healthcare (I’m a therapist) will be insufficient to address the need and demands of this time - I’m not sure this model has ever been sufficient. So I’m trying to start community healing groups starting with groups for teachers. We need to relearn and reembody our innate capacity for compassion and learn to skillfully apply it to ourselves and everyone around us. Lighten the load by caring for the load together. Create decidedly depatriarchified spaces of healing. Because even the mental healthcare models are patriarchal and neoliberal. But, man. The road ahead is long and the challenges to community healing are great. We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We’re so socialized to hide suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences. We’ve dropped off a cliff in the ability to connect through compassion. My mom has never talked about her magical marriage, her beloved mother or us, her kids. She says these things are so precious that she needs to keep them close. I wonder at social media - are we exploiting that which we should hold preciously close? and in that conditioning ourselves to never share a burden? I hope people - helped greatly by essays such as yours, AHP - will start to see the need for healing and pursue a truly healing lifestyle.
"We are unused to sharing real emotional burdens with real people. We're so socialized to suffering and put forth what is awesome for our citizen-consumer audiences, We've dropped off a cliff in the ability connect through compassion." YES yes yes.
I’d love to come to your teacher groups!!
If you’re in Buffalo, I’d love for you to come!
I felt this entire piece in my bones. Thank you for writing it.
I'm 53. Menopause arrived a few months into the pandemic. It's been... a ride.
I hear you, see you, same, same, same. Will I ever be able to sleep through the night again? Or at least for 4 hours straight? TBD! Not to make light or it but as I said to my sister-in-law, menopause is absolutely outrageous.
Yes you will sleep better after its done…. There is a light. I slept like crap from about the age of 40/45 (part of it was the snoring going on next to me) until I a. Got over the menopause symptoms and b. Gave my hubby a room of his own. It makes a huge difference. I was about 58-60 before it all really settled down.
Another book rec: _What Fresh Hell Is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You_ by Heather Corinna
I highly recommend the book "Flash Count Diary" if you haven't read it yet!
I'm 41 and terrified of menopause. Just having female hormones and reproductive organs has been difficult enough on my brain and body. I shudder at the thought of it getting WORSE.
My friends and I are so angry that NO ONE TOLD US what we were up against. My mother surely didnt talk about it. My (male) doctors never of course did. I had a female doctor for a little while, and she gave me some hormone replacement for a few years and also Lunesta to help with the HORRIBLE falling asleep issues. I am so glad there are places like this where you can at least get information from actual people who have had a variety of experiences. Read up and arm yourself with information. Perimenopause starts causing weirdness far earlier than you would expect. I remember when I was around 40 driving home from my sisters place 4 hours away and getting this really strange tingling/flushing sensation. I thought I was having a heart attack or something. Someone not long after that said- oh that is called a power surge. What the actual F. On the other hand, not having your period is freaking amazing. So its not all horrible. Lol. Hang in there! Find your tribe you can get through it with. It helps. I am now 64 and while there are other annoying things going on, you really do find yourself during that time. And you dont put up with a lot of shit from anyone once you have gone through it all. You got this!!
Yeah, I'm simultaneously worried about perimenopause while also dealing with ovarian/endo problems that will probably no longer be an issue once that happens (hallelujah). I have some older female friends that talked about some aspects, but they don't have preexisting mental health problems like I do. I already have mood swings, insomnia, and brain fog, please don't make it worse!
It is one of those things that is so individual- you just dont know what will happen. Literally one day at a time is all you can do. Have an open dialogue with your friends if you can, find out their coping mechanisms? Identify yours? I had coaching around disordered eating at that time, and it was tremendously helpful as an extension to the rest of my body relationship too. One of the biggest things I used to get through hard moments was- your thoughts are just thoughts, they are not your truth. It became a mantra some days. I hope you can find ease in the years to come with this
Your point about telling yourself “I have it so much better than most” really resonated. I have three kids under 9 who were home from March 2020 through January 2022 all while my husband and I worked full time from home. BUT! They did online school beautifully! My mom, a retired elementary teacher, came and helped tutor them! We didn’t have to leave our bubble! We even moved to Florida one winter! No one got sick! We didn’t have any high risk conditions! Our income actually increased! How could I possibly be stressed or complain? And yet, heartburn, palpitations, tingling in my extremities, acne, headaches. The list goes on. I was extremely stressed for all of it and I think I only started to realize it when the kids when back to in person school in January.
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Someone once told me that there is a theory that the generation who raised the Greatest Generation (think King George VI) died in their 50s and 60s because they lived through WWI, a pandemic, the depression and WWII and the stress of those things compounded to actual poor physical health, and if you look at the generations before and after, those people mostly lived until their 80s or longer. I think about that a lot these days.
Woah, you are probably onto something...all of my great grandparents (born in the 1890s) died in their 50s and 60s. My grandparents seemed weirdly "old" culturally by the time they got into their 50s and 60s but most of them lived decades longer. This was probably a reaction to their parents dying in their 50s and 60s. My mom turns 68 tomorrow and people consistently think she's at least a decade younger and I still don't think of her as a senior now.
Happy birthday tomorrow to your mom (AND ME)!
Thank you! Happy Birthday tomorrow to you!!!!
I have been a voracious reader of literary fiction and nonfiction since I was a preteen. Then the pandemic — my husband has an organ transplant so the risk for him just keeps increasing as our society takes fewer precautions. We live in a very red place. And I can’t read this way anymore. I listen to romances when I exercise (thank you CS Discord for all the recs). I read a couple of newsletters, try to manage 1 piece in each New Yorker which I promptly forget. I miss my books so much but I just can’t focus.
I really appreciated this piece for its acknowledgment that the pandemic -- with all of its stressors -- is not really over. I am so tired of folks suggesting that it is, that we can just go back to normal, as though there is still a "normal" somewhere out there, as though our lives -- and our bodies, really, the world -- have not fundamentally changed.
CW: weight, diet, and emotional abuse
Thank you for writing this. I'm exceptionally lucky in the grand scheme of things, but between the pandemic and being a biracial Black person in Minneapolis, I was carrying a lot of stress. I felt like my body was in revolt. I started snoring, had more frequent migraines, developed a noticeable amount of grey hair (I'm in my late 20s), and gained a significant amount of weight (which isn't bad, just not something I'd experienced before). I felt fairly certain stress was the culprit early on, but I had just started living with a pretty terrible (now-ex) boyfriend. He told me I was lazy and stupid for gaining weight, often saying, "It's just calories in, calories out. It's not hard." (I wish Maintenance Phase's latest podcast existed at the time.) I started believing my boyfriend. I hated my body and tried to punish it into compliance. Instead of turning to my favorite low-stress and stress-relieving workouts (yoga, walking outside, paddleboarding) I did a lot of intense cardio and ate like a bird. This seemed to stress my body more, but my boyfriend said I simply wasn't working out or dieting hard enough. When I talked to folks and mentioned that I think stress might be behind the changes in my body, I was told it was more likely the cheese I ate or that I didn't do crossfit.
I'm not all the way symptom-free now (*looks at world chaos*) but since I broke up with my boyfriend in November and moved out, I haven't had a migraine and it seems like I've stopped snoring. And not that weight is an indication of health, but I'm back at my pre-pandemic size. Looking back, I really regret how much time I spent hating and punishing myself for a normal reaction to stress in a very stressful time. I regret ignoring my own first instinct about the root of my symptoms and instead let other people's fat-phobia and body shame take over. I hope that through this collective experience, we can change how stress is recognized and treated.
This piece and your question on Instagram gave me the idea, if not the permission, to actually stop and notice what was going on in my body. I cannot believe how many things have changed in 2 years, and it’s saddened me to identify with so many symptoms from your list; small shifts that I hadn’t even taken the time to acknowledge. Thanks all for sharing them
Yes. I don’t have the energy to write a detailed response, but yes. Thank you.
This is all hitting too close to home.
I attributed my own hairfall to a delayed reaction to four surgeries in 2018-19 & the anesthesia required for those, plus an 11 day stay in ICU.
Looking back, it was most likely due to the stress of isolation. My husband retired in 2019 & then all of our travel/fun-life plans evaporated in 2020. We were stuck at home together. My favorite person became my co-prisoner.
We learned to give each other space. He’s a news junkie & I had to go lock myself behind a closed door to avoid the barrage of information about trump & the pandemic. (At least he watched MSNBC & PBS & not Fox!)
We saw no one-adult kids stayed away to keep us safe, (they worked with the public), our groceries were curbside pickup. I talked to friends on the phone occasionally, but we all felt the same way. The fabric of our daily lives was ripped-with no one to see, safely.
Pre-vaccine was unbearably lonely. I read a lot, rediscovered sewing & quilting to pass the time. I bought a used electronic keyboard & practiced sight reading sheet music for hours. We both gardened, played with our cats. I paint & have dozens of unframed canvasses stacked in my art studio. I have started taking long drives alone just to get out of the house. I gained 35 pounds.
It’s hard to be 66 & lonely. I am double vaxxed & double boosted, but with sub-variants on the rise, I do not go anywhere without a mask, which gets me dirty looks in our town. I do not want to risk long-Covid, my autoimmune conditions are bad enough already. After the school shootings last week, I despair that things will ever get better in our nation. It is all so damn depressing.
I am looking for a therapist, but no one has openings for new patients. I made an appointment for mid-September. I will persist at surviving. But just barely.
I relate, I'm also 66, recently retired, living with my boyfriend who has chronic medical conditions and believes that if he got COVID he would become seriously ill. If it was up to him, I wouldn't even go to the grocery store. We are fully vaxxed and boosted, and I believe that social contact is part of maintaining my health. He gets extremely anxious if I suggest that I meet friends for dinner.
I was assuming that by now the Omicron wave would have retreated to where I could make plans to go to hear music and see people, but instead we are hearing of still more waves to come. I have an annual checkup with a new PCP this week, I actually marked on my "pre-appointment" questionnaire that I sometimes feel depressed. I am hoping that he will "prescribe" regular social connection.
I am very fortunate to have excellent health, have had no physical manifestations of stress, except for weight gain. But I do frequently feel like I'm losing my sanity.
I wish you strength and healing.
I hope you are able to get in to see someone. Therapist friends have talked about the challenges of seeing patients (especially new ones) through zoom--it works for some. I think we are meant to be social and be with people but it is still so hard to balance that with being safe. Take care.
I have been to numerous doctors over the past few months trying to figure out why I just felt WRONG and BAD all the time seemingly out of nowhere. They couldn't find anything physically wrong with me and just shrugged. Today's piece was like, OH NOW I GET IT. It's sort of a relief to know it's probably not some mysterious undiagnosed illness...but in other ways it's even more terrifying because what do I actually DO about it?
It’s been covered before but: so many people go to the doctor and they say “You need to take time off work and rest” - but it’s simply not an option. I’m not talking about reluctance to take PTO, I’m talking about the *inability* to take PTO. When “taking time off” means losing your job, income, and health insurance…you simply can’t. And it’s fucked!