While philosophers will expound upon the importance of knowing yourself, sometimes, knowing why things are stressing you out doesn’t mean that you can easily change the level of stress or your response to it.

It’s been 7 weeks, more or less, since the dishwasher’s fill valve failed full on, and the long remediation journey began. Thanks to inability to get anything scheduled around the hole Christmas makes in the schedule, and then supply chain issues with the flooring, and then coming down sick with overlapping infections (which led to postponing the workmen – no point in getting their crew sick)… the repairs should start Monday.

Which has been 7 weeks of stuff piled in places it shouldn’t be, temporarily, until things are fixed. Okay, it’s in stuttering progress, this isn’t the total lie of Palestine calling a fully functional permanent city a “refugee camp”, but it’s still Not Right.

I really do not like clutter. There’s a logical reason it stresses me out – I’m highly allergic to both species of dust mites, and broad swaths of the plant kingdom’s pollen. Clutter is something unattended, and things unattended build dust rapidly in Texas. Therefore, when the house as a whole is cluttered, I will find it increasingly hard to breathe, and my joints will start swelling just slowly enough it’s hard to say “Ah, they are swelling!”… but the always-present pain grinds me down, and never gets better, and I never feel rested. This has happened enough times that my back brain sees clutter, and gets stressed, knowing what’s happening at a gut level even if the conscious brain isn’t paying attention.

Even if I were able to stay perfectly on top of the cleaning (and I’m not: the remediation fans proved that dust had gathered in spots I’d overlooked, and proceeded to distribute it along with drywall dust and insulation fluff enthusiastically throughout the house), the sight stresses me out.

I thought I was coping. I mean, aside from Peter going to the ER with stupid-high blood pressure because his body decided he wasn’t coping, we were doing fine. Aside from coming down sick for a month, with staggered, overlapping bacterial and viral infections. We’re fine! Why are our bodies acting like we’re stressed out? We’re fine! We know this is temporary, and will pass!

And then we moved the bookcases, in preparation for a wall being patched and painted, to match the opposite wall where the water damage required removing several feet of sheetrock. I have bookcases in front of bookcases, bookcases shoved in the guest room blocking the door open and making it near-impossible to fold clothes on the ironing board, bookcases my office blocking the reference books and cookbooks in the case behind it, tubs of piled books from the top of the bookcases (it counts as an extra shelf, until you need to move it) stacked on the floor and the couch and any spare spot…

I suddenly went from writing on the days I wasn’t working 12-hour shifts, to writing about 20 words a day like pulling teeth, to not writing at all.

I know what the next chapter should be, but I can’t make fiction words come.

Stupid brain! Just because the body is refusing to listen to me and is acting utterly stressed out doesn’t mean you should be, too!

…Oh, hey, look at that. Pulse oximeter says I’m running 95% O2 Sats, and a resting heart rate of 110bpm to keep it there instead of my usual 74bpm. Right, we just disturbed a lot of dust off those books, and we are in cedar pollen bloom season, so the “fresh” outdoor air is poison-filled.

Okay, body, I gave you heavy duty antihistamines. You have oxygen again, without running the blood fast and hard over the lung interface. Why aren’t you making with the words? What do you mean, you’re still displaying chronic stress?

Okay, fine, I did do on-call shifts instead of actually resting last weekend, but they were on-call! It’s not like I went to work! (Well, not all day, at least!)

*sigh*

Sometimes, no matter what I want to believe, I am forced to acknowledge that I’m not a brain controlling a meat suit, I am a highly intricate and interconnected nest of biochemical feedback loops, and symbiotic relationships with untold colonies of bacteria from skin to gut. And when the system is stressed out, it doesn’t matter how I rationalize it…

The words are gone, the body has noped out, and I’m going to actually have to… to… rest.

Grumbled expletives here at the realization that even the dreaded, hated, ‘rest’ might not fix this.

Maybe I’ll have something useful for you by next week, right about the time the workmen should be smashing and tearing up what tiles on the kitchen floor didn’t lift in the inundation. Isn’t the whine of high-powered vacuums and tile saws and jackhammers, and the dust inevitably produced, easily ignored, and completely irrelevant to stress levels?

…maybe not.