He stood there holding my résumé like it was evidence in a trial, his finger pressed against the paper, telling me that if I knew JavaScript, then I should know PHP too, and that when he got back from vacation, he expected results. Funny thing about moments like that: the person leaving for vacation goes home lighter, while the person left behind carries another brick, metaphorically speaking.
And that metaphor is intentional. I’m using the brick in the context of a wall, where each brick represents an individual piece of pressure, memory, stress, or experience that slowly builds into something larger inside you. One brick by itself means nothing. Enough of them, and suddenly you’re carrying a wall.
I started realizing that what everyone kept calling depression was not that simple for me. It was stress layered so heavily that it began to wear the same face. Everything was arriving at once. I was trying to keep my blood sugar under control, trying to do my work, trying to be a husband, trying to hold everything together while deaths in the family began stacking up too.
Then came the medications. One antidepressant, then another, because the first was not doing enough. By that point I was on what my doctor called a cocktail. On paper, some numbers improved. Inside my own life, nothing felt corrected because the source had never changed.
“Fear that every small thing meant something else was about to fall apart.”
The source was pressure. Relationship pressure. Work pressure. Fear of making mistakes. Fear that every small thing meant something else was about to fall apart.
Even when my blood sugar came down, I could still watch stress move through my body in real time. Sometimes it was not food doing it. It was a conversation. Tension. Anticipation. Overthinking. The body reacting to what the mind was carrying.
That is when I began understanding how medicine often succeeds at measuring what it still cannot fully explain. Blood sugar numbers. Blood pressure numbers. A1C numbers. If they improved, it looked like progress. But paper never showed what was underneath them.
For me, stress was always underneath them. Pressure at home, pressure at work, pressure inside my own head, all arriving together. My blood pressure would rise, and my blood sugar often followed. Sometimes the damage came from nothing you could put on a plate, only from carrying too much for too long.
That is when I started understanding why meditation helped me so much. Deep breathing was not just breathing. It was forcing my body to slow down long enough for my mind to stop running ahead of me.
When you are stressed, you are usually living too far forward, thinking about what could happen next, what might go wrong, what you still have to carry. When you are stuck in the past, you are replaying what already happened and giving it fresh energy again. The only place where the body actually settles is the present moment, but most people do not realize how difficult it is to stay there when the mind has been trained to run.
When I finally found myself alone, I started stripping things out of my life, and that did not just mean food. It meant clutter, noise, habits, and eventually relationships too. I began realizing that certain dynamics were not working for me.
“One uncomfortable exchange can sit in your chest longer than the meal you ate that night.”
The more social life increased, the more everything around it increased too: eating unhealthy food more often, drinking more than usual, staying out later, carrying conversations that sometimes created tension without meaning to. And once tension enters, it does not always leave when the moment ends. It stays in the body. It follows you home. One uncomfortable exchange can sit in your chest longer than the meal you ate that night.
If this way of thinking speaks to you, or if you have lived some version of it yourself, follow along at Valley of the Sun Press (Sign up). I write often, sometimes daily, and I build these pieces the same way life arrives: one thought, one observation, one truth at a time.
Upcoming articles: weight loss and keeping it off, blood sugar control without medication, simple cooking, and the strange things I learned when I started removing stress instead of only treating symptoms.
