I have an emotional hurricane season.
It tends to arrive around the same time every year, and after more than half a century I know enough to expect it. August carries memories and anniversaries that my calendar may treat as dates, but the rest of me apparently does not. I know the weather pattern. I know some of the warning signs. I know that grief has a way of remembering things even when I am busy getting on with life.
This year, hurricane season came early.
The summer has been challenging on a number of fronts. I have been dealing with physical issues that have limited me more than I care to admit, and at the same time I was hit with something that has always been particularly good at getting inside my head: financial insecurity.
As a freelance consultant, income is not always predictable. This summer, a combination of lost work and delayed payments gradually ate away at the small cushion I had built for myself. Nothing catastrophic happened, but the uncertainty wore on me.
That uncertainty started feeding everything else. Financial stress affected my physical health. My physical health affected my mental health. My mental health made dealing with the financial stress harder. Somewhere along the way I became caught in one of those negative feedback loops I have written about before.
Eventually some of the immediate pressure eased, but by then I was already depleted.
And the money was only part of what was happening.
Some of the physical issues I have been dealing with have made activities I once took for granted much more difficult. It used to be nothing for me to walk to Broadview and back, about a 2.5 kilometre round trip. Last week, during Taste of the Danforth, I barely made it three blocks.
That gets frustrating. It also gets isolating.
But I can’t blame all of the isolation on my physical health.
There were social invitations I turned down simply because I didn’t want to be around people. There were opportunities to get out of the house that I ignored. The more overwhelmed I became, the more I withdrew. And, of course, the more I withdrew, the more alone I felt.
Another feedback loop.
I did reach out to a couple of close friends, but even then I noticed something about myself. I wasn’t really asking for help. I was reaching out because I was lonely.
There is a difference.
A common theme running through many of my posts is that men don’t ask for help. Or rather, in this case, I don’t. I can write about asking for help. I can encourage other men to do it. I can recognize how important it is. Actually doing it myself remains another matter.
Pride is certainly a big part of it. So is a lifetime of believing I should be able to handle what is in front of me. I suspect there is also a difference, at least in my own head, between letting someone know I am struggling and actually saying, “I need help.”
Last week I even called out from my weekly facilitating. I simply did not have the emotional bandwidth necessary to sit in a room and hold space for other people.
That decision bothered me. Being dependable matters to me. Showing up matters to me. I take the responsibility of facilitating seriously, and part of me still wanted to push through and do what I had committed to doing.
Recognizing I couldn’t show up properly was its own kind of honesty.
Then August arrived.
August has never simply been another month for me. My mother died on August 5 when I was thirteen, just weeks shy of my fourteenth birthday. More than fifty years have passed, but apparently grief does not pay much attention to arithmetic.
Some years the anniversary passes relatively quietly. Other years I can feel it approaching. I have come to think of this period as my emotional hurricane season. There are certain dates, memories and losses clustered together, and I have lived with them long enough to know that the emotional weather can get rough.
Usually, knowing the season is coming helps.
This year I entered it already depleted.
The financial insecurity had been grinding away at me for weeks. Physical pain and limitation had narrowed my world. I had been isolating more than I realized. By the time the anniversary arrived, there wasn’t much cushion left emotionally either.
I am only now beginning to understand something important about this summer.
No single thing knocked me over.
It was the accumulation.
Money. Pain. Isolation. Grief. Frustration. Pride. The constant background noise of wondering what happens if the next payment doesn’t arrive, or if my body doesn’t cooperate, or if I simply don’t have enough left in the tank for what somebody needs from me.
Knowing my patterns did not make me immune to them.
I have spent decades looking inward, trying to understand why I react the way I do. I know that I isolate when I am overwhelmed. I know financial insecurity frightens me. I know certain dates carry emotional weight. I know I have trouble asking for help.
Knowing the forecast, however, does not mean I control the weather.
The storm is easing now. The financial pressure has backed off. Mentally, I feel clearer than I have in weeks. The physical issues are still there, as is the grief, but today they feel less like everything is arriving at once.
I’m not sure there is a grand lesson in any of this.
Maybe there is only a reminder that even after all these years of recovery, therapy, reflection and writing about this stuff, I am still capable of finding myself standing in the middle of my own emotional hurricane wondering when exactly the weather changed.
And perhaps the important part is simply noticing that the sky is beginning to clear.