I’ve always felt like coping mechanisms and stress are at a perpetual arms race. One side figures out something big, then the other.
Did you ever read the Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss? It’s about two groups who decide they are much too different to cohabitate because one prefers to eat bread with the butter on top, and the other prefers it on bottom… and they get into this Soviet – American 50s-60s style competition. It starts with throwing a rock, then the other side takes sticks to knock the rocks back, and so on in increasing complexity until each side simultaneously discover a substance that can be held between the fingers, but can destroy a town.
Obvious cold war reaction, but even having been born after the cold was was over it still stuck with me.
My point is I broke out some stronger munitions, in coping mechanism terms; THC, alcohol and meditation, the nuclear option of coping. I mean, I guess the really nuclear option would be heroin, but no matter how many times I ask no one has told me where one might purchase it.
Anyway, the point is that even so, stress has some pretty big tricks up their sleeve; my food benefits being revoked after I had been told they were renewed… bank account run dry… there’s just more here than I can take, and that’s in my semi cloistered semi stupor.
I want to die, but since at the moment that’s more work than I want to engage in, I guess I’ll drug myself into sleep. Sleep is the closest we get this side of life to being dead. like a fast forward button through the trudgy bits… I’ve fast forwarded through several years already, and I see no reason to do any different with the days ahead