Some Shit About Stress and Happiness

     It's been a roller coaster the past 6 years. Just this stage of life, or perhaps all stages feel this way as they come.

    I've watched my health as a woman in her early twenties declining like a rock slide. One rock smashing into another larger one till the whole damn mountain is falling.

    It's been hard to watch, harder to feel. However, the hardest thing about it is coming to terms with the gruesome truth that it's been my fault from the get-go.

    Merriam-Webster defines the word EMPATH as

    "One who experiences the emotions of others" 

    I define it as mildly to extremely toxic, AF. 

    I believe that many people are born with a sense of empathy in them. It seems to me to be more commonly acted upon among women, though I have met some very empathic men too.

    I think there's surely nothing wrong with empathy. In a sense it makes us more human. Men seem to be better at telling people to "F off" though and I envy that.

   I took that empathy shit way too far, and it has caused me so. much. stress.

    And I know my girls are out there raising their shitty wine glass, or whiskey (I feel you) saying "Yo, me too."

    It's exhausting worrying about what someone thinks, wondering if you did a good enough job at something you weren't even required to do. 

    It's crippling wondering if it'll be taken wrong that you're prioritizing yourself tonight by taking a bath and getting to bed early instead of going out to the bar. You're not trying to hurt any feelings. You're trying to prepare yourself for kicking ass at your dreams tomorrow. AND THAT'S JUSTIFIED

    Better still, going above and beyond to be the most helpful person ever and then creating a situation where you're expected to do what you originally did as a thoughtful favor.

    I'm a people pleaser, I get it. I want to be everything for everybody's something they need.

    So when does this circle back to where this post began?

    Right, with being 25 and feeling like complete sh*t for 3 straight years.

    Funny thing, as I've dug deeper into my menagerie of health issues that many people close to me probably don't know exist, I've found one repetitive catalyst.

S T R E S S 

    Six letters of destruction. Self inflicted or not, stress eats away at you until you and your body really just can't take it anymore. Then if you add a healthy dose of alcohol, an empathic personality, an extremely physically demanding and under-eating lifestyle, you've got yourself quite the cocktail.

    I really love my comfort zone, there's a whole lot of people to corroborate that. My old boss and mentor loves to giggle at how tense I am riding colts and how he would remind me to breathe. And if he's reading this he's surely laughing at it again. (P.S. come ride with me sometime, not much has changed J. Law.) 

    Point being, it takes a lot for me to talk my mind into allowing myself to do something I'm surely capable of. I'm having to try really hard at it and sometimes I don't succeed. It's the most awkward in my own skin feeling ever.

    You write your own story in your mind. You create your reality with your imagination and subconsciously act upon what you think. I've seen myself play this out over and over until I just really can't deny its truth.

    I've been reading some books and I've finally started to make some headway on my health issues, it's going to get better and better, I can feel it.

    I feel like everyone has these huge dreams somewhere deep inside and it is really just a matter of whether or not they act on them. So I decided to do some acting and make some changes to my lifestyle and my business. 

    The rewards haven't yet been reaped but I think it will be worth it, there's already a load of stress and huge weight off of my shoulders. I've even found myself writing again, and I love it.

    I hope somehow these monotonous ramblings will make you contemplate what you truly value and I hope you prioritize it above all else.

    All the love, 

XOXO, Gussie 

Mental Nothingness

 The most worn out metaphor I can think of is waves. 

And yet my best metaphor to describe my ever changing feelings is; waves.

Sometimes they're drowning me, sometimes they're taking me for a hell of a ride.

Either way there's exhaustion of some sort, a wariness waiting for me on the other side.

My fingers have gone so long without typing now that it feels truly awkward.

Which is sad because writing used to be such an important piece of my identity.

Now it feels like something I used to do.

And it is. Writing used to come to me like a flood of words dying to escape my head.

Then I began to fill my mind with facts and concerns, with heavy memories and trauma, with stress, anxiety and shit I can't control.

What begged to escape me then, was curse words and anger, hatred and blame.

Writing was no longer an outlet but just more work. It became work to express my emotions, my ever so complicated, self inflicted misery. 

I made myself start a journal.

I've always struggled with the idea of a journal.

I'm a planner by nature so once I've spent my entire day figuring on how I'm going to do things it seems pointless to list it all out.

I realized I had so confined the idea of a so I decided that I would just write.

At first I had nothing to say so I just wrote what I did that day.

And then I start to spill over the top and the words were coming back to me.

A couple times I even escaped back into the place of mental nothingness where I used to write from so much.

Just an honest and peaceful, clean slate in my mind where I just allowed the words to leave me without effort.

It gave me a little bit of faith again, that maybe I still have that shard of myself inside dying to be unpeeled.

Xoxo, Gussie