Every couple years, I hit a point where I am doing so much/thinking about so much/fussing about so much/going through so much that my head kind of implodes into itself.

It doesn’t really do anything dramatic, the implosion (no oozing fluid out my ears, no mall rampages, no psychotic breaks, no Vegas weddings, no underwearless paparazzi shots). It just turns me into a procrastinating, frustrated scatterbrain.

I start losing track of details, putting off tasks, panicking about the future, stressing all over the people I love… and generally creating a big wasp’s nest of GRRR for myself.

And make no mistake: once you start down that path, it pretty much perpetuates itself until you have a much larger mess to clean up than when you initially began to freak out.

Sigh.

I took this quiz today on a whim to see if my stressballdom was actually justified in any way, and it turns out that the amount of life events I’ve gone through in the past five years make me a prime candidate to be a stressball.

I’ve changed jobs (from Stressful Job A to Stressful Job B), experienced financial hardship (freelancing: get clients before you start!), moved three times (and am planning a much LARGER move soon, away from everything I know, which will require a new job and plenty of money), experienced a chronic illness (or two), learned the news of my infertility (which continues to rock me now and then), lost a family member after a long illness, had major changes in my spiritual perspective, started a LONG distance relationship with someone who already has a family (who I met on the Internet, for the love of Pete), and the list goes on and on.

Then I took it for a couple of my friends and my parents, and it turns out that we should ALL be stressballs.

So I can’t really justify letting everything slide just because life is handing me a very full plate. I need to treat the stack of things and stuff like a Chinese lunch buffet and dig in until my pupils dilate and I smell of wontons.

The problem is that I start to see my life as a large tangle, rather than a set of small things I can conquer one task at a time, or one sparerib at a time, to continue the buffet theme (I think I’m hungry.)

It doesn’t even matter how many day planners I start writing in (I never finish one — never have), how many “productivity apps” I download onto my iPod Touch (I forget to update them, or the interface is more stressful than actual stress), or how many gentle nudges I get to make it happen (or forceful shoves forward.)

I lie awake at night and think about everything, en masse, and wonder what to do. And then daylight rolls around and I put everything off until… you guessed it. And then things become last minute and frustrating and disorganized, which is mightily at odds with my other big brain trick, OCD.

It’s like shoving a cat and a dog into a shoebox and expecting them to get along.

I mean, usually the solution to wondering what you’re going to do about something is to DO something, and then deal with the aftermath AFTER, rather than anticipating it right up to the last minute… the minute when you have no choice but to act, and your odds of success have dropped significantly.

I can’t seem to get the timeline right on that one, and I’m feeling it.

But I’m trying to remind myself daily that the worst case scenario isn’t usually the one that happens.

That I have amazing family and friends that I need to open up to and get advice from, instead of crawling into my head.

That I spend a good portion of the day enjoying what I do, and that I can keep growing and developing my skills so I feel even more confident.

That my relationship, while stressful logistically, is a blessing that I can’t even explain to you.

That I am safe, well fed, comfortable, and on the mend, health-wise — and could be even better off if I took action.

That I laugh ten million times as often as I cry.

That I can make a list of things I need to do, and actually cross things off it.

That I need to be accountable instead of avoid-y (I invented that word. You’re welcome.)

Imagine how I’d sleep.

I see it, this more reasonable existence, and I want it, and I’m going to try.

Just thought I’d let you know.