Coping

[ladysprite]

Everyone has their own ways of dealing with stress, frustration, and unhappiness. Some people drink, or go running, or hit things, others sleep it away or clean their houses or find other immersive techniques to hide from the world.

Me? I bake.

Today was miserable. It started out with nightmares that swallowed up most of my sleep with such absurd topics as being forced to go bowling as a team-building exercise by the boss of a clinic that I'm not particularly happy with right now. (Yes, I consider bowling unpleasant enough to be nightmare-fodder. It's a quirk.)

I woke up to pouring rain, and spent a day with surly support staff arguing with unhappy clients and continuing a week of euthanasia and absurd diagnoses, with the added knowledge that this isn't even the end of my week - being unable to say no means that I somehow wound up scheduling myself a six-day work week.

By the time I dragged my sorry backside home at the end of the day, I was exhausted beyond reason, feeling guilty about being too tired to stop at the pet store to pick up snake food, frustrated at having to work on Saturday, and convinced that the world was an unpleasant place designed for the specific purpose of making me miserable. My angel of a husband put together something vaguely resembling dinner, though, and eventually I lurched zombie-like from the sofa and started stumbling around the kitchen, digging through the cabinets for the components of my talisman.

Preheat the oven.
(Thaw out my frozen-stiff shoulders and spine)
Sift together the flour and baking powder and cream of tartar.
(Filter out the bad pieces of the day until they blur in my memory)
Cream the butter and brown sugar and the vanilla.
(Pull the disparate parts of myself together into something like a whole person)
Stir the dry and the wet ingredients together, and toss in whatever chips are in the pantry.
(And finally feel a sense of accomplishment, watching three things become one new thing, completely disproportionate with the actual significance of drop cookies)

Now the house is warm and comfortable and smells like toffee, and I'm on the sofa again, but comfortable instead of semi-conscious. Buffy reruns are on TV, and the first two trays of cookies are cooling on a rack. And I'm human again, at least for the moment.

Comments

"team-building exercises" are nightmares

[edthetallguy.livejournal.com]

My sympathies on the nightmare.

Even things that would normally be fun turn into torture as part of a "team-building exercise".
Have the exercise be something unpleasant and you are indeed in the land of nightmares.

Boss critter: "Hey team! Let's go do karaoke!"
Me: gibber, whimper, hide in cable trough until the last door slams.

On the other hand, the second drop cookie off the cooling rack (I always manage to grab the first
one too soon and burn myself) is one of the insufficiently heralded delights of Western civilization.
(It's also the only safe way I've discovered to explain the meaning of the word "sensual" to an
8-year old.)

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

I do that too. Baking makes me happy. (Though somehow the effects seem to be more visible on me. :-) ) I'm glad it worked for you.