Let me tell you a secret.
Come close.
No, closer still.
You know, there are some people in the world who don’t get stressed?
I mean, they get stressed, but not like you or I. Their stress does not consume them whole from the inside out, burning up until you cannot focus on anything apart from the sheer worry that is tumbling around your mind.
You know them? You might have seen them at work, or in your friends. The people who are seemingly unflappable. Who just seem to be able to cope with whatever life throws at them.
Whilst you’re here, with me, in this corner, crumbling into dust.
Have you been told to just not stress? To just relax? Ah, like me too. It’s hard to do, when you have no frame of reference.
Let me tell you another secret.
I don’t know how to relax, at least, I don’t know what it means to feel relaxed. To not have to fight and battle the stress and worries away until you’re in a place of relative calm.
But it’s relative calm.
The shoulders are hunched, the stomach coiled, the legs tense. Your smile is thin, your eyes are darting, and your hair is thick with grease. Sweat pours from your hands or your airmpits or the soles of your feet. You clothes feel sticky, they feel constricting. You try to loosen your collar because it’s tight around your neck but you realise you’re wearing at t-shirt.
There is nothing around your neck.
That’s relaxed, when you only get a few things. A juddering knee or a tapping of the fingers when the rest of your body is still.
At reminder that the stress is still there.
It lurks.
Watching.
Waiting for you to break.
It’ll take me, just as it’ll take you, at some point.
I hope you valiantly battle as I against it.
Good luck.
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Alex.J.Cobalt 