The past two weeks wore on me; at times, I felt like I could drown in the pool of stress I had been slowly sweating out of me, a thick quagmire created of my own internal angst that seemed to engulf me from all sides. I’ve drained that pool in the last couple of days after trying a little exercise I like to call Clearing the Roof. Because I realized that stress is a top-down issue, it was going to have to be dealt with right up there, on the roof, where all that clutter and debris had been sitting, decomposing into mucky, thick, unmanageable gunk. Some of it was fresh, identifiable, easily swept away. Some of it had been there for years and was entirely unrecognizable. A whole lot of it, it turned out, was just settled pollution, junk particles that had come to rest because nothing had ever washed them away. It had been a much longer time than I thought since I had done this kind of personal maintenance.

Good thing I had a tall ladder.

But first, some backstory: For years I have talked about the importance of letting go of stress. I have let it eat at me in the past while I absorbed it from other people like an emotional sponge and the effect is that it triggers very strange migraine effects that mess with the speech center in my brain, causes a blind spot that travels across my field of vision and has, on one particular occasion, caused a trans ischemic event that, for those unfamiliar with the term, is kind of like a small stroke during which I lost control of my body, hallucinated that the table full of Happy Hour beer and appetizers was bouncing around, tossing things at me, and then I could not make sentences that anyone (else) could understand for about twenty minutes while my left hand tried repeatedly to climb up my chest. Continue reading Clearing the Roof →