I Am Excellent Under Pressure

I hear him call out my stats.

Blood pressure, one fifty over ninety-six. Cholesterol, high. A1C, borderline.

Data is telling.

And also tells you nothing. Doesn’t it?

Because not one of those numbers says that my shoulder has hurt since spring. That I haven’t slept through a night in three months. That this is not my normal, and I have known it wasn’t my normal for a long time.

He writes the prescriptions. He advises lifestyle changes. Diet, exercise, work.

Ten minutes. That was the whole appointment.

And sitting there, I already knew what I was looking at. I have studied this. Every one of those numbers is what a body does when it has been braced for too long.

So I ran my own chart.

I relaunched my solo practice this year, after three years of consulting.

My sons are working, single, and “sonning” - which means I am their only support and they are also advising me on my finances, my time, and my relatives.

My mother fell in January and broke her arm. I could not get to India. So, I became the phone call. The emotional support, the coach, the therapist, for both my parents, from nine thousand miles away, while managing my own guilt about not being in the room.

My mother-in-law sold a property, and the tax issue landed on my brother-in-law and me. Three months of calls with accountants and banks, across time zones, for a house I have never owned.

And a friend moved back to her home country. I helped her go. Then I lost her from my daily life.

That is what the numbers were made of.

He didn’t ask about any of it. Not one question.

I wasn’t angry at him. He asked the questions a sore shoulder walks in with. That is the appointment I booked.

I was angry at myself.

Because I knew. I have known for months. I could have said: I think this is stress, and I think it has been accumulating since February. I could have asked whether there was another way in before we went to medication.

I said none of it.

I said what I always say.

I’m fine. Thanks.

I would like a trophy for that. Best Under Pressure. I have been collecting them since I was about eleven.

Here is what I did instead of saying it.

I filled the prescriptions, because the pressure is not letting up any time soon and my body should not have to wait for my life to get easier.

I hired a coach. Yes. I am the coach. I hired one anyway.

I outsourced dinner, so that one decision a day stopped being mine.

Movement is off the table until the shoulder gets seen, and I am still waiting on that appointment.

Four things. Done inside a week.

I am, as established, excellent under pressure.

But that list is not recovery.

That is me doing the only thing I know how to do with a feeling: turn it into tasks I can finish.

You do this too.

Something is happening to you and you have already converted it into a system. A supplement. A tighter calendar. A harder week. An app that tracks it.

What’s yours?

And how long have you been running it?

I’ll tell you the sentence I didn’t say.

I have not said it out loud to anyone. I notice I am typing it instead, which is its own kind of avoidance.

I need someone to take something off me.

Eight words.

I have said harder things to rooms full of strangers.

I have not said that one to a single person in my life.

Because the moment I say it, I stop being the one who handles it.

And I don’t know who I am on the other side of that sentence.

So I’m not going to tell you to say yours. I haven’t earned that.

I’ll only tell you that it exists. That you already know what it is.

And that turning it into a task will not make it stop being true.

- Sarika

A Steady Hour. An hour to put it down.

I keep three open a week. Three, because that is what I can actually hold.

No agenda. No form to fill in. You say the thing you haven’t said. I listen.

Book a Steady Hour

I also went and read the actual research on what accumulates in a body over months like these, and wrote it up properly. It is more clinical than this letter, and it uses words I don’t use here.

Read the full write-up