When the stress doesn't stay at work -- and your nervous system carries it everywhere.
Every day, I would leave work and drive home.
And every day, I had absolutely no patience left.
I had no patience left for the three boys living in my house who were never doing anything more than just being exactly who they were – three boys, eager and loud and full of stories about their day. Their constant chatter felt like overstimulation instead of connection. Instead of hearing excitement, I heard noise. Instead of enjoying the comfort, I was longing for solitude.
My kids are good kids. And they were then, too. They were children then, so of course they made mistakes. But when those mistakes brushed up against old emotional triggers of my own – parts of my story that I’ll share later – my reactions frequently outweighed the severity of the infraction.
I was definitely not responding from a regulated place.
If one of the boys told a lie, I couldn’t see it through the eyes of a healthy nervous system – as something that children do while learning social norms and while testing boundaries. I couldn't treat as something that, while wrong, it was something developmentally appropriate and something that required guidance and conversation to help them understand why it was wrong. Instead, I took it personally. I interpreted it as rejection. It was evidence that I didn’t matter.
If a dish was left on the counter instead of placed in the dishwasher after breakfast, I felt a surge of frustration. They were old enough to know better, I would tell myself. They knew what the expectations were, and they should be able to meet those expectations.
What I couldn’t see at the time was this: at work, children were being asked to do things that were often beyond their developmental capacity. And I knew that. I advocated for them. I absorbed that weight. I reassured others that I could carry that weight.
And then I came home and I was irrationally furious that I was having to carry it there, too.
At work, I held the weight for students and teachers.
At home, I felt like I was expected to do the same.
It became too much. I remember crying to my husband one night, telling him I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t be overwhelmed at work and overwhelmed at home.
And I was frustrated that I felt overwhelmed at home. My kids were never asking for anything outrageous. My kids were just being kids. They deserved more than what I had available for them.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that my body – and my nervous system – had been sounding an alarm for a very long time.
At the worst of it, weekends stopped feeling like a reprieve.
They became increasingly empty stretches of time where I was too exhausted – physically and mentally – to make plans. Too tired to imagine getting dressed, putting on a face, or summoning the energy to be “on.” Months would pass without seeing friends outside of work. Not because I didn’t love them. Not because I didn’t miss them.
I simply couldn’t imagine having the capacity to enjoy myself.
What makes it especially painful to look back on is that I knew – logically – that if I went, I would probably have had a great time. I would laugh. I would feel lighter. I would come home glad that I had gone. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier to do so. The effort to get there felt insurmountable.
During this time, as well, unpredictability became unbearable.
If plans changed last minute, my reaction often outweighed the situation itself. A small shift could feel overwhelming, destabilizing, even threatening. At the time, I didn’t understand why. I just felt embarrassed by the intensity of my emotions, confused by my inability to “go with the flow.”
Looking back now, I can see it clearly: my nervous system was desperate for routine, predictability, and stability. Last-minute changes weren’t just inconvenient – they were one more signal that nothing was solid, nothing was safe, nothing could be relied upon.
I didn’t have that language then. I just felt like something was wrong with me.
I also began to notice how narrow my world had become.
I watched the same TV shows over and over again – not because I lacked interest in anything new, but because there was something deeply comforting in knowing exactly what would happen next. No surprises. No emotional demands. No uncertainty. My poor husband must have watched The Devil Wears Prada a hundred times in a period of a couple years.
Again, I didn’t realize at the time that this was my nervous system clinging to predictability wherever it could be found.
Somewhere along the way, I started to feel like a shell of myself.
And it happened quickly.
Not long after getting married, my life changed in several profound ways at once. My career responsibilities intensified. I became a bonus mom to three boys, children from my husband’s first marriage of whom we had primary physical custody – and it was a role I took seriously and cared deeply about. Bonus parenting is not for the weak, and while I would never even want to imagine my life without them, it is an emotional minefield to navigate. And not long after, my father passed away suddenly from a routine medical procedure. Grief entered my life without warning – and without an instruction booklet.
There was a lot happening.
And quietly, steadily, the number on the scale began to rise.
That, too, took a toll. The tighter my jeans became, the louder my thoughts grew. My self-esteem eroded as my attempts to regain control became more frantic. I tried to count calories. I tried to do intermittent fasting. I spent hundreds of dollars on internet programs that promised to fix my metabolism and give me results from structured workout plans. I tried countless times to get back into running with running programs. I set unrealistic workout goals and then would criticize myself when a night of poor sleep kept me from waking up early enough to workout. I began dreading social gatherings, convinced people would notice how much weight I had gained.
The more overwhelmed I felt, the harder I tried to grip tightly to something – food rules, routines, expectations – anything that promised control.
What I didn’t yet understand was that none of this was a failure of willpower.
It was a nervous system that had been carrying too much without effective coping strategies, for far too long.
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