Waves of Sadness and Exhaustion

The sad hit me around 5pm last Friday. This was not my depression; it was a wave of just...sad.

Oh hello, Sadness.

I'm usually exhausted by the end of day on Fridays anyway. Long gone are the days of getting off work and going out for a drink with friends to blow off steam, my typical, non-quarantined Fridays are now just getting my ass home before I pass out. So tired is typical.

But this last Friday was total exhaustion. Not the exhaustion of a busy work week, though I did work from home all week and staring at a tiny laptop screen instead of my usual large monitor has taken a toll on my eyes. But this exhaustion has come from the emotional toll of a global pandemic. I'd been feeling that exhaustion come on every day. My body had been aching and I was battling daily headaches and daily stomach upset.

I talked about this on Twitter, but my body has weathered unimaginable emotional storms before and I know this feeling well. Emotion lives in the body. Your body bears the scars of your trauma and your mental anguish. And because my brain is quiet adept at compartmentalization (trauma response), my body often tells me before my mind does that something is stressing me out or causing me pain.

Anxiety and stress targets lots of places on the body. It can feel like a hangover. Achy joints and back and a throbbing headache and a sour stomach are all the effects of anxiety for me. But I know everyone else is feeling this now too. We're all weathering a collective anxiety and we're all hurting physically and emotionally.

So on Friday, it rolled up on me hard, sadness balled up in my chest and bubbling up. I'd stopped working (which had been distracting me from the pain all week) and I was just trying to figure out why the sound on the TV wasn't working and suddenly it was the thing that broke me, or rather, it broke me down, down the dam of coping that had been holding me together.

I'd been irritable and tired, but suddenly it was anguish. Anguish for myself, for my little family, for my extended family and friends, for my city, for my country, for my continent, for the world, for a collective grief for this massively scary and painful thing we're all experiencing at the same time while isolated from each other. It's awful to experience collective trauma while having to keep your distance from others. While I grieved for the dead and dying and for the future dead and dying, I grieved for that too, for the collective loss of physical embrace.

My face and body crumpled and the tears came along with sobs. I'd love to say I let myself cry, but it was coming with or without my permission.

Ride that wave

There was no anger in it, not this time, though anger is perfectly normal right now. No it was pure sadness, a deep and unending blue that boiled up from my depths and washed over me. So I sat in it. I sobbed. And I sobbed on and off for the next couple of days. I freaked out my husband who just wants to tell me everything is okay, though it's not. It's not okay. And I don't want to pretend it is.

I don't think we should force ourselves to tread water in all the grief and sadness, because that's not emotionally or physically sustainable, but this weekend I felt it and I wanted to feel it. I wanted to float on it and be apart of it. I needed to be in it.

Today I feel a little excised. Not better, not happy, not recovered, not even in the next stage of grief, but relieved. It will come back, as waves do, but I rode that wave as long as I needed to.

You know that feeling when you have something stuck in your throat and it takes an embarrassingly amount of coughing to lodge it loose, but when it finally does, that relief? And your abs hurt from coughing and your throat is scratchy and you're tired from the effort, but you got whatever that irritant was out.

That's what I'm feeling today.

If I didn't cough it up, it would fester and rot and create deeper pain. I should know, because I did just that for the first several decades of my life. I coped with my trauma by suppressing it. My brain tucked it away where I couldn't find it, because the truth of it was too awful to bear. I don't blame myself for this. It started at my start and it was done to me before I could even grasp it. But it's caused lifelong emotional scars, but also physical ones. My body showed the signs long before my mind could open up that pain. When I opened it up, it was overwhelming, but I've been learning to feel and explore it ever since.

Addressing pain, letting yourself feel it, doesn't feel great. Okay, it does feel a little good in a cathartic way, especially if you've been bottling your emotion for a long time. But it can also feel like shit. It can be overwhelming and tiring and difficult, but it's important. Again, I don't think we should force it and in the midst of facing truly life and death odds, it's okay to cope however you need to cope, but also know it's okay to feel whatever it is you feel. It's okay to break down. It's okay to be scared. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to feel.

Float through it

It's also okay to laugh, to find joy, to cling to the good things, because that's human. It's human to feel the full range of emotions, including happiness. Being human is complicated and you don't need to feel guilty for feeling it all. You don't prove your awareness of atrocity by being sad or angry all of the time and, honestly, you don't need to prove anything to anyone.

And then there's the science of it. Stress is bad for your immune system, and our immune systems could use all the help they can get right now.

When we experience such stress...your body responds by sending defense signals to the endocrine system, which then triggers the release of various hormones designed to prepare the body for an emergency. In doing that, the hormones, particularly cortisol, also depresses the immune system. Increased levels of cortisol, in fact, can decrease white blood cells and inflammation, while increasing tumor development and growth and the overall rate of infection.

Now. just in case you're me, you read that and stressed out about being stressed and then you've defeated yourself before you've begun. Instead, I'll tell you what my therapist and other experts say: find ways to offset that stress. Mediation, stretching, exercise, calming and centering activities (for me: writing or reading or a movie), hydrating, etc. can all help alleviate stress. My therapist has me write my stresses out and throw that paper away, so that they're outside of my mind and body and literally somewhere else.

Laughter is an incredible destresser, but so is crying, which, turns out, is also great for the immune system.

Particularly in emotion-based tears, a potent bacteria-fighting protein called lysozyme helps us fight illness and infection; this is a protein also found in human milk, mucus, and saliva. So, shedding tears is a great way to bolster our body’s natural defenses against the very stress depleting us.

So I say go ahead and cry. I sure do. And then drink a lot of water because you're probably dehydrated now.

And then have a great big virtual hug from me. I could use one back. Then please tell me how you're feeling today.