Stress on Steroids

Ever since the start of the pandemic, stress levels have risen dramatically. People's normal lives being disrupted has created much unsettling. The crazy thing is like I said in the beginning, social isolation is nothing new to me. 

Even the symptoms of COVID-19 are literally nothing in comparison to everyday life with a traumatic brain injury. Anyone who suffers with a TBI knows the extremes of fatigue - for no apparent reason. We also know the feeling of muscle aches and pains. We know headaches worse than anything else (the first time I got a TBI headache I went to the emergency room lol). Anyone who knows me knows that I know weird random chills all day every day therefore can never know if I have a fever! I also have persistent stuffiness. And anyone with a traumatic brain injury knows the stomach pains and we have the taste/smell symptoms worse - everything is increased to the point that the smallest smell or taste can overwhelm our system entirely. 

So, I'm sick of people complaining about all these symptoms and talking about how terrible their lives are when they have no idea how easy they have it - this is not their everyday, there will be an end to these symptoms, and their symptoms are only a baby taste into my everyday life. 

Then, the black lives matter riots began. This created a lot more stress in the air. "Black lives matter!" "All lives matter!" "George Floyd, Breonna Taylor!" "Defund the police!" Shootings for no reason. Stealing, breaking buildings, etc. The tension heightened. 

Possibly the most critical election in human history. Super. Even more interesting, after listening to awesome people like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, my political side has been (re-) awakened. Being in debate all throughout high school, I love talking about politics with others. Which is difficult for multiple reasons; first because I don't have many people to talk to period, second because the current political state is so controversial that anything you say can and will likely be taken personally and third because not being able to talk to people about something I'm passionate about just further devalues my sense of self. 

Relationships have taken a grave toll. The man that made my life so much brighter in late 2016 has now made my life much darker. Many of my close friends randomly went AWOL. 

I've been learning things about my body. Things that I literally cannot change. It is so freaking frustrating! But what's even more frustrating is that it only adds more stress, especially every time I look in the mirror, I take a picture or I change clothes. 

I have so many things on my list of to-dos. One of which for the last few MONTHS has been to write this post. There is an extreme amount of stress just in the air today, let alone the kind of stress involved in my personal life. The kinds of things that stress does to the human body are terrible, absolutely terrible. It causes cell damage, brain deterioration, inflammation, anxiety levels to rise dramatically, depression to sink even lower, among other things. Now, for someone with a brain injury, as with everything else, it is amplified dramatically and even exponentially. I begin to become crippled, spinning in my own negative thoughts. My progress halts and even starts to regress. Then I beat up on myself even more, and the stress gains, and the spiral continues. I cannot even begin to describe the stress complex. But, I tried, after a few long months.