I Was a Stressed-Out Superhero of Self-Sabotage
Life sucked until I learned to take off the cape.
One morning, during my single-dad freelancer days, I woke up to discover two things: my bank account was down to zero, and the rent — which was late already — had to be paid by the end of the day or we risked being evicted.
I got the kids off to school, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work. I called past clients asking for new work, followed up vague leads, put pieces of my tech equipment on eBay with absurdly low “Buy-it-now” prices. I didn’t have anyone who could loan me the money, and without a “regular job”, I wasn’t eligible for any of those predatory payday loans.
At 5pm I had down-payments from new clients, I’d collected a few hundred in PayPal from eBay, and I had $1600 in my account. I sat back at my desk, wrote the rent check, and ordered a pizza for me and the kids to celebrate. I had done it. I felt a rush of triumph, the thrill of victory. We were going to be ok — until the next time.
And that was the problem. Yes, the stress of scarcity and necessity had turned me into a superhero for a day, the financial equivalent of a mother lifting a truck off their child. Stress gives us super powers all the time. It gives parents the strength to stumble down the basement stairs to put the vomit-sheets in the laundry at 3am after their beloved-but-pukey child has finally gone to sleep. The stress of being fired from your jobs is the motivating factor in so many entrepreneurial stories that it almost seems like you can’t be a successful unless you’ve been suddenly laid off.
Being a superhero is addictive
The amygdala — doesn’t care what kind of stress I’m having. It basically has two settings: everything’s good, and holy shit, I’m about to be eaten by a bear! And by “bear” it means “anything new in the environment that I wasn’t expecting.”
Thankfully, we humans are narrative creatures — we learn to tell ourselves stories after the fact about whatever caused that rush of adrenaline. A person suddenly grabs you as you walk down a dark street: I’m being attacked! Then you see it’s your friend. Oh, that scallywag! That’s alright, then. The fact that we can re-write what that burst of stress…
