Stress Screaming

In the 90s, when my chickens were little and I was trying to hold it all together, I would do this little “exercise” with them called Stress Screaming. We would pile in my car, just the three of us, and I would start to drive down the road. Once I was sufficiently far away from anyone who could hear us, I would count to three. The idea was when I got to three; we would all let out the loudest scream we could manage for as long as we could manage. I figured if I was stressed, those little babies of mine had to be stressed as well. I knew, for sure, we weren’t worried about the same things, but I’m sure school or soccer or going back and forth between parents had to be stressy for them, because it was, without a doubt, stressy for me. I had other things to stress out about back then, like trying to avoid bouncing checks at the Walmart, trying to make sure the heat wouldn’t get turned off in February, or figuring out what was for dinner besides fish sticks, again. I often had a never-ending amount of angst building up inside of me, and the only way I knew how to alleviate it was to scream. To scream loud and long. I also learned that just letting out a blood-curdling scream in front of my little chickens without an explanation would not only add to their own stresses but also have them wondering if their mother was going mad. So I included them in my little “exercise”. It got to the point where I would say,  “Come on, we are going to scream,” and they’d get their shoes and bounce off to the car with looks on their faces like I just said, “Come on we are going to Disney World.”

Fast forward to the day after Election Day 2024, I once again found myself sitting in my bed numb. I couldn’t believe we were back here again, and I found myself needing a good old-fashioned Stress Scream. I threw on some clothes, crawled out of bed, and went outside, and as I stood on my deck, I realized I couldn’t let out a blood-curtailing scream in my new neighborhood. I have only met my next door neighbor, an 85-year-old man, who, I’m confident, would race over to my house in his golf cart if he heard me scream. So, instead, I walked down to the garage, got in my car, drove it out of the new neighborhood, and as I was winding my way down the mountain, I started to scream. I screamed the whole way down the hill, twisting and turning on the switchbacks until I reached the bottom. I screamed for my sanity. I screamed for my daughter. I screamed for all the people who were hurting and numb just like me and for a brief second, I felt slightly better, but only slightly. I wondered how this exercise worked so well twenty-eight years ago and seemed to fall flat this time around. Was it because, in reality, my problems in 1996 were far easier to solve than they are now?

If I was to be honest, I don’t have many problems these days, certainly not like in 1996, and while this election was a big problem for me, I’ve/we’ve been through this before and I/we survived. I know that is zero consolation to all my gay friends, my daughter and her wife, all my friends of color, all my friends who are struggling financially, and all my women friends and their healthcare, and it was little consolation to me on Wednesday. It’s not much of a consolation for me now, but I went back through my blog posts and found this post I wrote the first time we were here, and I felt slightly better thinking, we are going to be okay. This time around, I’m not so anxious to move to Canada as I was last time; I don’t have my form filled out, nor do I even have it printed or bookmarked on my computer. I just built a beautiful house up on a mountain, with amazing views of both the sunset and the sunrise. I love this little country, this experiment of democracy, and I have to keep telling myself that there are more good people than there are crazy people. I will help those who will need it in the coming years, and I will distance myself from the crazy, but in the end, I’m going to be okay.

So I recommend the exercise of Stress Screaming, even if it’s a daily occurrence, and it might even be, this early on, an hourly exercise, but I recommend it. Then, I suggest you surround yourself with like-minded people who love you as much as you love them. Keep those people in your life that need extra protecting close, keep them safe, and check on them all the time until they tell you they will also be okay. And when things get really bad and really dark, scream as loud as you can, scream until things change, scream until your people are safe, scream until you feel okay and like you can carry on until the next time you need to scream again. Remember, there are way more of us good people than those crazy people, and we will be okay because what are the options?