Enough

Last Friday night, at Vigilucci's, I had finally had enough. Enough to eat, that is. And I made a startling discovery—well, startling for me anyway, in the sense that you can read all about this stuff and think you understand it until it bites you in the behind unawares: I was under stress. And others around me were, too.

Funny thing, stress.

Two landmark buildings were brought down in a horrific act of violence in our country two months ago. Then some sick bastard, or bastards, started sending anthrax in the mail. I am thousands of miles from where this has happened, and, I assume, pretty low down on the target list. I have had a personal connection to the atrocities in New York, but it was a tangential one. In other words, I didn't lose a loved one, but a fine person I know did.

So when I heard psychiatrists on the news talk about the stress "the American people" were under, I thought, give me a break. Ask the firefighters in New York about stress, I think they might be able to tell us. Or the families of the victims. Or the people who handle our mail, millions of pieces of it, wondering if it's contaminated, every day. Flight attendants and pilots. New Yorkers. Soldiers. The Afghani people. Those folks have stress. But "the people"? We have stress? Not like those folks have stress!

I'm sticking by this, but with a caveat: Apparently I have been under a little stress—I did just finish directing a race, and I have several big deadlines at my job. Apparently this thimbleful of stress was worsened by events happening around me. And now, with my newly opened eyes, I can see it in others, too.

This is interesting to me, because I do know from real stress—things like a family member's illness, an intractable work situation. I know all about that. This did not, as they would say in court, rise to the level of those stresses. And yet, apparently, stress it was.

So, somewhere around the middle of September I decided it would be OK to have a cookie. The thing is, I really can't have a cookie and stay a normal size. It's a metabolism thing unique to me, I suppose. Very frustrating, but there it is.

A little switch in my brain ticked over and said, "Life is short! Look around you! There's nothing wrong with a cookie every now and then!" How silly—but hey, apparently stress doesn't always come at you with a big hammer. Sometimes it's insidious and trivial. Funny things happen when you're afraid to open your mail.

So I had a cookie, or at least part of a cookie. And I continued to give in to cookies, and to small bites of ice cream, for weeks. That is, until I'd finally had enough. Hm, I thought, why are you doing this? Why are you so ravenously hungry and so vulnerable to cookies? Look around you, and finally understand: This is a hard time for everyone, and you are not immune. Everyone has cares. They just manifest them in different ways.

One friend has lost the motivation to train, utterly. Some friends struggle with motivation and wonder if it's worth it to race and train anymore. Some folks have gone the other way: They're training like beasts, right through the off-season, perhaps to send a message that they can, and so they will, terrorism be damned.

Me, I reached for the cookies and kept training, with one eye on CNN and one ear on National Public Radio. Not healthy, not healthy in the least, but what can you do? I didn't think that I needed watching over because I was fine.

My stress is so paltry that it hardly seems worth mentioning here; it is like background noise. But I do mention it here, in all its trivial glory, because I figure others might notice it in their lives, too, if they'd just give it a moment's thought. Honestly, once I turned my attention to it, it took about five seconds for me to have a Homer Simpson "D'oh!" moment. As in: "D'oh! That's what this unholy interest in cookies and bread products has been about!"

Once you see it, you know what to do: Acknowledge it and move on, take steps to be gentle with yourself and do like John Collins, says: Keep on keeping on. That's what I'm doing, anyway.

What's stunning is that I somehow made it through 36 years on this planet and 10 years in a very stressful business knowing all about stress, and even admitting I might be experiencing it occasionally—but not acknowledging it as an actual liability for myself. So it finally found a way to show itself to me, in the shape of a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie.

So now, with this little bit of insight in hand, I'm more inclined to cut myself some slack. To be a little gentler with myself. But as for cookies, I'm back on the wagon. More or less.

TO LANTERNE ROUGE HOME

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