The poison poppy of stress
If you are reading this because you hope to find the answers to your own challenges, remember: I am not a shrink. Do not go off your meds because you read here that someone else managed to deal with anxiety without pills. Never change your medications without first discussing your plan with your doctor. That said, if this blog gives you some ideas that make your life better, or if you have ideas to share, more power to you. And I’d love to hear about it.
Yes. My beloved employer, affectionately known as the Great Desert University (GDU), decided to switch all bimonthly workers to biweekly pay. When you’re paid on a biweekly basis, your annual salary is doled out to you in 26 payments, rather than in the 24 larger payments you would get with bimonthly pay. For me, this change meant a de facto cut in net monthly income of $220 a month—and I was just getting by on my bimonthly net. Living like Scrooge McDuck, I managed to stay within my means, but only barely. How on earth was I gonna get by on two hundred and twenty bucks less?
This challenge really threw me into a tizzy. For the past couple of weeks I had spent hour after hour at frenzied rebudgeting, but no way could I figure how to eat, feed and medicate two aged ninety-pound dogs, and pay the bills on the reduced income. Fortunately, a month earlier the insurance plan I’d subscribed to canceled coverage of the Mayo Clinic and so the state held a “mini-enrollment” in which I changed to a much cheaper plan. But even with that saving, the $220 cut in net pay would still leave me with too little net income to make ends meet.
But that wasn’t all. As you might guess from the factoid above, I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods. Shortly after I moved into my present home from another house in the same development, a local landlord who had silently conceived a dislike for me threw about five gallons of used motor oil over the back wall into my swimming pool. This didn’t do the pool much good.
My homeowner’s insurance paid most of the 10 grand it took to replace all the equipment and replaster the pool. My semi-demi-exboyfriend and I were able to prove Mr. B*** was responsible for the vandalism and took him to court. During the proceedings, he threatened a judge and so alarmed my lawyers that they urged me to sell my house and move immediately. But I simply couldn’t afford to do so—I would have taken a $40,000 loss, and I just didn’t have the resources to absorb a hit like that. So, I was stuck in this house until I could retire, recoup the costs of buying here, and move far away. Assuming I lived that long.
As it developed, one of Mr. B***’s daughters—the one he has been heard to call his “Pretty Daughter”—lives catty-corner across one street from my new house, and the other daughter lives two houses down with a paranoid schizophrenic who periodically goes off his meds, frightening Mr. and Mrs. B*** so much they won’t visit when he’s there. At one point a police SWAT team stormed Other Daughter’s house because they believed her husband had killed or seriously injured her. Then catty-corner across the other street (mine is a corner lot) is Carlos the Knife, a ninety-year-old gentleman who occasionally takes after his wife and daughters with the kitchen cutlery. Next door to Pretty Daughter and her two kids is Biker Boob, a tattooed fright given to roaring up and down the street at all hours of the day & night on an unmuffled Harley, and directly across the street is Dave’s Used Car Lot and Marina, whose friendly and laid-back proprietor cultivates a weed arboretum in the front yard, where he stores his collection of trucks, trailers, inoperable cars, and boats.
Hey. At least Dave is good-natured!
After the court issued restraining orders against Mr. B***, the semi-demi-exboyfriend (SDXB), who lived next door to the perp, jumped on his white charger and galloped off into the sunset. Literally. He put his house on the market, sold in less than 24 hours, and moved to Sun City, on the far west side of the Valley. This was not before he got into a quarrel with the schizophrenic B*** son-in-law, who announced that he would come onto my property whenever he felt like it. (Apparently that’s what the poor guy was trying to do when Anna the German Shepherd caught him sneaking in the side gate a couple weeks later. Not surprisingly, Son-in-Law had a bad afternoon that day and had to be attended to by the occupants of three police cruisers and two vans full of public health service psychiatric workers.) Over the next two years, a steady series of small acts of vandalism drummed away, from bags of bloody meat juices hooked on my recycling bin to repeated nocturnal entries into my backyard.
These two soap operas alone would be enough to drive a normal person wacky. But they were far from all. My son and I had just copurchased a house as an investment. We bought the fifty-year-old fixer-upper as-is, a scary proposition. Though he pays a third of the mortgage and over time will buy out my share of the equity, for the moment I’m covering two-thirds from investment income. Renovation would require another 25 grand, and it presented the cheery prospect of weeks and weeks of the Workman Waltz.
At the office I had to deal with a difficult supervisory issue that seemed intractable. Our HR manager was having me keep a daily log of related matters, a record that might be helpful someday but as a practical matter eroded my own morale by forcing me to rehash a great deal of annoying garbage. Because of this situation, I had begun to time my comings and goings to minimize the number of hours I spent in the office, and I contrived to work at home frequently. I called this scheme “Creative Malingering” (CM), and, and although my job classification allows me to set my own hours to a large extent, I was not especially comfortable with it.
I wasn’t sleeping well at night, I was drinking too much, and my aging German shepherd looked like she soon would have to be put down. She was only one of two large, elderly dogs (her pal was a greyhound) that required constant clean-up, care, and expensive medication. The shepherd, in particular, needed to be medicated six times a day, quite a trick when you’re supposed to spend the day at an office halfway across the galaxy.
Maybe I wasn’t nuts. Maybe I really was stressed. I drew a little diagram of the things that most wear on my nerves, and the sketch above is what it looked like. Lo! The Poison Poppy of Stress.
Once I could see it all as a picture, it came clear that the worst sources of stress in my life were the ongoing harassment and vandalism from the B*** clan, the expensive and workful dogs, and money. These were followed closely by the nagging personnel problem and the question of how we were going to gut out and rebuild a 1,300-square-foot house whose plumbing and electric dated back to the Korean War period.
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