Stressed AF in H-Town

Introduction

I started writing this earlier this evening, in my head. I often express lengthy thoughts and feelings in my head and then never write it down later. I have probably written a book by now while driving, doing dishes, mowing the lawn, and folding clothes. My thoughts are always much better than my writing, which is why I rarely attempt to write anything down. I am doing so now because I think it might help me as a form of therapy. Instead of talking to a therapist, I will talk to the page, to you, whoever you end up being. I feel like most of the time the only legitimate reason to write something down and share it with other people is the chance that they will identify with it and be helped by it somehow. I don’t know if anything I have to say will resonate with you or help you, but that is the intention. Disclaimer: I am not offering any advice. This is simply a “rant” or “vent” that others may identify with. I want to share my feelings in the hope that you can be honest about yours, as well. I think we all need to just be honest with ourselves about the mental health crisis that seems to permeate life in the 21st century.

I am apprehensive about writing this because I fear that others will judge me or belittle my experiences. I sort of don’t know how to start because I increasingly don’t know how to express myself in a world where everyone is constantly told that someone else’s suffering is more important, real, or genuine. So, I fully expect that some people will think I sound whiny, weak, or entitled. That is fine. But, seriously, I don’t know how to express myself because I also don’t know how to feel. That is part of the problem I am trying to resolve by writing these thoughts down. You see, I am really fucking stressed out by life right now, as are many others, but I am also acutely aware on a daily basis that I am quite privileged and have things better than most, so I have this tendency to always remember that others have it worse and that my “suffering” or “stress” isn’t much compared to what others are going through and I end up disregarding my own hardships and burying things that I feel, but all the while I am being impacted by the world and my experiences and it can harm my relationships with others, including my wife and children, and I want to get a handle on things and be a good husband, a good dad, a good neighbor, a good teacher, etc. I just no longer know how to orient myself towards my own experience of life. I am always analyzing it from the outside like some cultural critic or political commentator. I am always evaluating my reactions to my own life from the perspective of those who would disregard or belittle my experience and tell me to either check my privilege (from the left) or count my blessings (from the right).

I guess what I hope to create on this page is a space for myself to feel my own feelings and a space for you to maybe be able to do the same for yourself. Basically, I want to complain and feel self-pity and for that to be okay. I want my experiences to be validated and not cross-referenced with the disadvantages and struggles of others. At the end of the day, life is harder for some people than others, but life can still be fucking hard for everyone. Right now, in the year 2021, I think life is pretty hard, whether financially, socially, or mentally. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s the natural disasters. Maybe it’s parenthood. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s all the above. All I know is that something has happened to me over the last 4 years and I am feeling it. I am very aware that I am different today than I was and that regardless of how well I can regulate my own emotions or head space, there is no going back to the world that I used to inhabit.

Is this just what being in your mid-thirties is like? Is this just the one-year anniversary of COVID? I never know how to feel about my own feelings. I never seem to know how to have the “proper” perspective on my own perspective. On most days, I tell myself that I have it pretty good, and I genuinely believe that I do, and that I should just focus on the task at hand and live my life by fulfilling my responsibilities to those around me: my family, my students, my fellow citizens, etc. But, on other days, I feel like I have issues and that they are real and that they need to be expressed and validated by others. I think that’s what friends are for, right? They listen to the un-filtered you without judgment and provide validation and encouragement? I feel like that’s what my wife gets from her friends, but I am a 34-year old male and I don’t have guy friends. Apparently, I am not alone in this.

Supposedly, men have less friends as adults than women. In other words, women do a much better job than men at providing support networks for themselves to promote their own mental health. Men just stumble along and then eventually write weird “journal” entries to some faceless reader like I’m doing now. Or they lose their shit. Obviously, I am generalizing. I know that plenty of women are lonely and lack the type of social network that I described my wife having access to. I am fortunate that I can express myself to my wife and receive validation, but I admittedly don’t always want to because of lingering male stereotypes about not whining and being stoic. And, to be honest, I don’t know if I really even want to have guy friends. Most days I don’t have the emotional energy myself to invest in friendships or other people’s issues. I have a hard enough time keeping my own shit straight so I can be a decent husband and father. I don’t have any answers on this question of friendship and how it can promote mental health, but I really do want everyone to be happy, successful, and content. From both a personal and political standpoint, I care about other people realizing their potential and living fulfilled lives. I feel the stress of my own life and the stress of others. I want everyone to be okay.

Lately, though, I seem only to be able to focus on myself and my own family, which is part of the reason I am writing this down. Maybe articulating my experience will help me wrap my head around it and allow me to better serve others. Maybe writing this stuff down will make it seem less dramatic or scarring. Maybe it will help you see that others are also struggling despite whatever reality they have constructed on their social media platforms. I love photographs because they have the ability to transform mediocre and even somewhat stressful experiences into decent and good memories. Social media is often a constant stream of photos that people use to create an alternative narrative about their life and I am no exception. Someone may get the impression that I have it all together and that I am happy, and I do have it mostly together (I think) and I am generally happy (honestly), but I am also super anxious, stressed, and disoriented. Another disclaimer: what prompted me to write this was an essay in the Houston Chronicle by Raj Mankad https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Essay-Houston-is-a-cheap-place-to-live-if-15966458.php about the “trauma tax” that Houstonians pay for living here. I completely identify with this concept, and obviously it can be applied to other cities, but if you live in H-Town then you know that we’ve had a few stressful years. This may seem ridiculously self-indulgent and “emo” when I’m done, but here is a chronicle of the events that have led to me being stressed AF in H-Town in the year 2021.

2016: Trump

I know, I know. Melodramatic from the start. But, in all seriousness, I think this is when it started for me. I’m a teacher so I’ve always been a little stressed, tired, and overworked, but I wasn’t like existentially stressed out until 2016. The election of Donald Trump was a life-altering, cataclysmic event for me. Our mainstream media is so paralyzed by a “balance” that normalizes the extremism of the Right and our conservative media is so far down the unapologetic propaganda road that it remains difficult to this day for many to comprehend, rationally and emotionally, how utterly insane it was that Donald Trump ever became president. I don’t think I will ever get over it. He was so unfit for office on every conceivable level. The fact that my fellow citizens saw him as someone worthy of that job completely shattered and altered my understanding of my own country. Every day of his presidency was an existential threat to our system of government, the rule of law, and the values and ideals that we claim to believe in. It was like the school-yard bully becoming the principal of the school. The entire complexity of what I felt after the election, and suffered through each day after, can’t really be put into words. All I can say is that it truly impacted my life in a deep, and negative, way. And it only got worse over time.

At the time, I was a high school American Government teacher. After 2016, I started to get anonymous and threatening emails from the parents of my high school students who thought I was too “liberal” in the classroom. Lessons and discussions that received zero scrutiny or pushback in 2015 solicited lots of attention starting in 2016. Everyone was on edge. Administrators in my building referred to anonymous parent emails denigrating my character as “data.” I received hate mail at my home address. I was constantly walking on a tightrope trying to provide high school seniors with a real civic education without inviting the wrath of their parents and it was draining. Teaching is a thankless enough job without being viewed as some sinister influence corrupting the youth. At one point, an administrator asked me what I was doing to invite the anonymous parent complaints, which to me was like asking a woman what she did to attract sexual harassment. I wasn’t doing anything other than my job, which involved using my knowledge of history and political science to contextualize current events and facilitate students developing relevant critical thinking skills. I truly wasn’t pushing a “liberal” agenda. I was just summarizing competing perspectives on policy and philosophy, some of which were undoubtedly critical of Trump, but to a certain type of conservative anything that doesn’t promote or reinforce conservative ideas is biased against conservatism and must be labeled as pushing an “agenda.” I began looking for an exit.

Looking back now, the best I can do to make sense of the Trump presidency is this: Liberal “elites” (and just ordinary decent people) said from the beginning that Trump was unfit for office and that bad shit would happen if he was elected. His supporters said “screw you” liberal know-it-alls, we’ll show you! He won’t be anything like what you say. He will fight for the “working man” and we’ll prove you wrong. Then, Donald Trump proved every damn day that the liberal elites were right all along. And every damn day, his supporters couldn’t stand the idea that they were wrong so they defended everything that Trump did. Intelligent, decent people who genuinely believed in limited government, law and order, and social conservatism slowly devolved into members of a cult that ultimately tried to undermine American democracy itself (and they’re still doing it right now).

So, that was the start. The election of Donald Trump. It became a daily source of severe stress, especially due to my job, from which I never recovered.

2017–2018: Harvey

My first home was a split-level in an older suburban neighborhood in northeast Houston. My wife and I bought it in 2012 when the housing market was still down and got a good deal. We were grateful to have a house, but we quickly decided that we wanted a different floor plan (living rooms and kitchens don’t need to be upstairs in Houston!). We also wanted a one-story so that we could sleep on the same floor as our baby. So, even though it didn’t make a ton of financial sense we moved to a different home in the same neighborhood after a few years. It was a nice house with a big drainage ditch behind it. It was a nice space to walk your dog. When the flowers bloomed in spring you could sort of squint and imagine that it was a small river and that you lived somewhere scenic in the countryside.

Harvey. The rain. The fucking rain. The fucking rain never stopped. I stuck a broom stick into the side of the ditch to monitor rising water levels. The water got super high (almost over the bank). As a result, the street in front of our house started to flood. Water was half way up our driveway at 4:00 PM and the forecast called for another 5–6 inches that night. I had a small dog and a toddler. Did I want to carry my daughter over my head wading through chest deep water in the middle of the night? No, I did not. So, we evacuated to my parents’ house that evening. We prepared for our house to flood. We elevated tons of stuff and I packed a car seat travel bag (really big if you’ve never seen one) full of personal stuff that we would need or want to keep. I put this pack on, which must have weighed like 75 pounds, like I was a soldier deploying overseas. My wife and I waded through waist deep water for over two blocks while holding our baby and dog above the water. We didn’t know what to expect from there.

That night, the storm shifted east and we didn’t get nearly as much overnight rain as predicted. Our house did not flood. We were extremely grateful for this and felt really lucky. We had lots of close friends who did flood and lost nearly everything. We counted our blessings, but just that experience of evacuating did something to me. I was never the same afterward in terms of my stress levels about rainfall. What did flood was my workplace. My high school classroom, my home away from home, my “social studies nerd cave,” flooded. Our high school was closed for 7 months. We had to commute 30–40 minutes away to another campus to do half-days of instruction. I had no personal space. I had no “office” to work in. I was a guest in someone else’s classroom. For me, my personality type, this nomadism was extremely stressful. I tried to find the silver linings, but it was honestly just a bad school year for me personally and professionally. It’s okay though, right? Shit happens! We must buck up and persevere. And, that’s what I did. I got through it. And I told myself nothing similar was likely to happen for a long time.

2019: Thunderstorm

Then, later that year, my house did flood. Except it wasn’t a hurricane with a name that we knew was coming. It was a fucking thunderstorm that just happened to drop an insane amount of rain on my neighborhood. A new housing development was being constructed adjacent to our neighborhood and they hadn’t followed the guidelines on retention ponds and drainage. The result: our neighborhood, the homes in which had never flooded in their 30-year history, had 1–2 feet of water in them. This was a big deal for me. Not just the fact that my house flooded, but for my stress and anxiety. How do you make sense of the fact, from a personal security standpoint, that your house could flood during a thunderstorm? It was traumatic. I said to myself: “but we didn’t flood during Harvey. So, how could we flood now?” How was I supposed to plan for this?

My wife and I were in downtown Houston at a dinner party. My daughter, fortunately, was staying at my parents’ house. We suspected, based on what we were hearing from friends where we lived, that our house had flooded. Again, we weren’t home. The dog was home. The dog almost drowned. We couldn’t make it from downtown to our suburb until 10:00 PM. We walked in waist, sometimes chest deep water, for over 10 minutes through lightning and thunder to reach our house. Upon entering, we didn’t see or hear our dog and assumed that she was dead. She emerged from the laundry room where she had been trapped for over three hours. I had just spent about $500 at Ikea on “big girl” furniture for my daughter’s bedroom, which was now ruined. Our book shelves were already starting to buckle and fall over, having absorbed tons of water. My wife and I are both educators. We met in a literature class at Texas A&M. We love our books. I am not ashamed to say that the first thing I did inside my flooded home was move all the dry books onto the kitchen counters to keep them dry. Plenty of books were destroyed on the first shelves though; many of them the books I had carried to class in College Station.

A year after my classroom “home away from home” flooded, my actual home flooded too. Still, even in that situation, I felt fortunate and counted my blessings. We had flood insurance. We had a generous support network of family and friends who helped clean out and “demo” the house. We had my parents who lived 5 minutes away with spare rooms. My almost 4-year-old daughter lost her bedroom though. And we lost the house that we became a family in. The flooding of our house coincided with me accepting a new job teaching community college. We decided to relocate to a different suburb in northwest Houston. We had photos taken of our house on Monday to put it on the market. It flooded on Tuesday. Again, we had flood insurance, but only on the house and not our belongings. So, we were able to use insurance money to pay off the mortgage and we sold the house “as is,” meaning without floors or walls, to some investors. Our finances were devastated. We didn’t know if we would even be able to purchase another home.

Despite being Millennials who entered the job market during the Great Recession, we had done okay for ourselves financially (with some assistance from my parents). We had purchased our first home while the market was still down, and had a decent amount of equity in our second home but lost some savings during the move. Now, we were essentially starting over. Here is where my privilege is really evident. My parents were able, and generous enough, to provide the money for us to furnish our third home and rebuild our savings. I did research using FEMA flood maps and made damn sure to buy a home that had never flooded and had not come close to doing so during Harvey. It was our “high and dry” forever home! New house, new job, new suburb. New beginning.

2020: COVID

Seven months into our “new life” we had a “new-new life” thrust upon us. Again, COVID has been difficult to process for the same reason that Harvey was. There is always someone who has it worse. Things could always be worse. You must count your blessings, but that also gets tiring because it results in you belittling and downplaying your own trauma and struggle. My wife and I were fortunate to keep our jobs and work from home. We had income. We were safe from the virus. We even chose to home school our daughter for kindergarten because our jobs provided the flexibility to do so. And, we were worried about our daughter. You see, she had a close-knit school community where we used to live. Then, her house flooded and we moved away. Big changes for a little person, but it was an adventure. New room! New school! Excitement. COVID. In less than one year, she was abruptly taken away from her social network at two different schools. The second time was far more difficult. She went on Spring Break and then never went back. Never had any closure. She did well enough during the spring and summer, but her mental health started to suffer in the fall and by winter we had her seeing a play therapist once a week to process all of her “big feelings” about all the “big changes.” We had a second daughter in December, which was a huge blessing, but COVID has still been hard.

Our family has made many sacrifices to promote public health safety, but we have been surrounded by too many people who think “masks are tyranny.” It has been a daily struggle being at HEB or Target with people who don’t comply with mask ordinances or take social distancing seriously. Compounding my civic confusion after the 2016 election, I now have a permanently altered perspective toward my fellow citizens having witnessed their behavior during the pandemic. It is hard to love your neighbor and promote the common good and the general welfare when many around you clearly don’t give a shit about science, public health, or other people. The sacrifices we were asked to make over the last year weren’t that bad. People had ration cards during World War II. We were asked to just wear masks and stand 6 feet apart. Many Americans openly defied and mocked these requests. My take away: we’re fucked when it comes to climate change. There is clearly no appetite for collective effort, social solidarity, or civic duty. This experience, the pandemic, has caused severe stress on a daily basis and has undermined much of my confidence about our society’s ability to solve collective problems in the future.

2021: Trump (again) and Winter Storms Have Names Now?

Trump lost. The nightmare is over! Wait. No, it’s just beginning! Trump says for two months that he won in a “landslide” and that Biden stole the election. Republican election officials refute Trump’s claims. Republican judges refute Trump’s claims. There is literally no truth to the idea that Biden won due to voter fraud. Doesn’t matter. Trump’s supporters believe him. And since news in America is a for-profit business the customers get to consume what they demand. Conservative media reinforce Trump’s absurd lie. Conservative politicians reinforce Trump’s absurd lie. It’s okay though. We have a constitution! We have laws! Wait. A mob carrying Trump flags storms and occupies the Capitol to disrupt the certification of the election at Trump’s urging? And only a handful of Republicans consider this attempted coup worthy of conviction during an impeachment trial? And the rest of them are still going along with Trump’s lie? Again, this is a lot to digest. The Republican Party no longer believes in representative democracy and elections if they lose. They are willing to do anything to stay in power. This should scare the shit out of everyone.

Then, the cold came. It snowed. My 5-year-old daughter was ecstatic that morning. We went outside to play. We had a great time. We started to hear that people in Austin didn’t have power. We started to hear that people in Houston didn’t have power. We had power all day. We were told to conserve power. Turn the thermostat down to 68. We did. We lost power at 5:30 that evening. It’s okay, I told myself. Count your blessings. Your house is starting out warm and it will take a while for it to get cold (no, it won’t). We woke up the next morning to the freezing cold. We go to sleep the next night in the freezing cold. We have a two-month old baby. My parents offer to take us in (again). We decide to stay. We have chosen to evacuate before. We have been forced to leave before. It’s cold, but we are managing. As we approach the third night without power, without heat, our neighbors’ pipes start to break. The neighbors to our left and right, the two houses across the street. People’s homes are flooding. Flooding? I thought I was done with floods! It’s fucking winter! Hurricane season doesn’t start for 5 more months! I don’t see any evidence of leaks, but I shut the water off to be safe. Now we don’t have water either. We filled the tub with some water before shutting off the water, but it doesn’t last very long. We filled the tub again with snow from the driveway. We didn’t know how long we would be without electricity, heat, and water. It was 20 degrees outside. My mind went back to the flood. How was I supposed to prepare for this? We felt so powerless. We felt so hopeless.

The power came back on that night. Thank God. Fellow Texans in Austin went another two days without power. Count your blessings. Still, two more nights of hard freezes. Water still off. Need to wait until it warms up to turn it back on. No pipes are broken. Thank God. The Republicans are blaming the power outage on wind turbines? My political and climate nightmares are now merging into one giant cluster fuck dumpster fire alternative reality. It’s okay. Just take a hot shower. You’ll feel better. As the warm water fills my hair and runs down my back I begin a sigh of relief that we made it through another natural disaster. Before that sigh is completed, the hot water knob flies across the tub and crashes against the tiled wall. It is followed by a fire hydrant stream of hot water coming out of the wall. Water is quickly pouring onto the tile floor and running across the bathroom. It takes about 3 seconds for me to fully comprehend what is happening and what needs to be done. “I thought I was done with floods?” I leap over the hot and violent stream of water, wrap a towel around my waist, and run outside across the front lawn. I drop to my knees to shut the water off (again). “When will I be done with water?”

ERCOT. PUC. Greg Abbott. Rick Perry. Ted Cruz. Ken Paxton. Uri. What a bunch of assholes. It was a bad week, but my kids are okay. An 11-year-old boy froze to death in a mobile home thirty minutes away.

Conclusion:

Am I stressed out? Yes. Yes, I am. What is my point? That nothing seems stable or predictable anymore. Your workplace? It can be taken from you in an instant without notice. Your home? It can flood or otherwise be destroyed at any moment for any reason without notice. Your family? They are at the mercy of other people choosing to care about the safety of others. You must always be on edge. Always in a defensive posture. Always in fear of the unknown. There won’t be a return to “normal.” The new normal is extreme weather events that will get worse as the climate changes. The new normal is radical disruptions to your daily life. The new normal is a political cult committed to forcing an alternative reality on everyone. We have never known what tomorrow will bring, but we could assume what it wouldn’t be without. Electricity. Water. Democracy.

Maybe things will feel better once the pandemic is over. We are so close. Cases are declining, vaccines are increasing. Wait, Greg Abbott just lifted the mask mandate and said restaurants can operate at full capacity? Wait, Congress just passed the American Rescue Plan? Thank God. Does my family need $5,600 dollars in relief checks? Not as much as some families, but we did pay out-of-pocket in December for our second daughter to be born at a birth center when the insurance company denied the claim. We also had to use our savings to replace my wife’s income because her maternity leave is unpaid. And, we should probably fortify our home for hurricane season. So, yeah, I will gladly take that relief money. Why do I feel like one political party wants me to thrive and the other wants me to die?

I know that many people have suffered more loss than me. I am particularly mindful of those who have lost someone to COVID. I know that many people are struggling more than me right now. But this is the stress and anxiety that I am experiencing and it is real. Your stress and anxiety is real too; whether it is greater or smaller than mine. Things are not normal and we are not normal. Our individual and collective mental health is reaching a crisis point and people need to be seen. Everyone needs to be seen. We need to help ourselves. We need to help each other. I have spoken my truth. I know that you have your truth too. We also share a truth. Things don’t have to be this way. We can do better. We deserve better. Remember to love your neighbor. Remember that elections matter.