Is Your Life Feeling Overwhelming? Try Leveling Down Rather Than Leveling Up.

Lowering the bar might just be necessary for your mental health right now. One Scary Thing at a time might be all you can handle.

Photo by Sara Tramp

Pre-Essay Caveat: This post deals with some stressful and overwhelming issues. Nothing that’s too much for me to handle. But I don’t want people to feel like I’m trauma dumping or stressing them out if they’re already feeling worried enough about people in their own lives. Take care of you and yours first. I’m writing items like this because I feel like when I do people who are struggling feel seen and heard and less alone. But by no means do I want people with enough darkness in their own lives to feel the responsibility to absorb mine. So please be protective of yourself and your own need for joy and stress management before reading this semi-anxiety inducing post.

I did something that helped me recently. I set the bar for myself much lower than normal. I’ve been struggling to keep up with the high expectations I have for myself, finding that day after day I was letting myself down by not getting the insanely long to-do list I’d created in my head (and on a Google doc to keep track) completely done.

And at the end of the day I’d find myself drenched in shame and embarrassment. How could that be ALL I got done today? What is wrong with me? What kind of entitled asshole thinks he can get away with doing those three things today?

So I’d overload, my ADHD brain would short circuit, I’d give up, and spend days on the sofa too paralyzed with fear and depression to do anything. I’d lay there stewing in self-hatred and shame, knowing I was capable of doing so much more yet getting so little done. This ended up leading me to a fear space where I was too down on myself to do literally anything. So scared of my own failure because I knew whatever I did would be wrong, insufficient, or done poorly and “wrong.” When you keep messing up over and over it does something to your brain. It makes it impossible to trust yourself - if you’d messed up so much in the past how could you not be messing up with all future decisions?

I am suffering from a series of four years that seem custom-designed to have smashed my self-esteem into smithereens. Nothing is “working” for me right now. My career is going okay, but not okay enough to support the expenses set up during more prosperous times. My physical health has suffered due to the mental stress of trying to keep up with an expensive life as my economy-reliant job has veered all over the place. My mental health suffered as I ended up being trapped alone in a house in the woods for years, alone only with the judgments of strangers who saw only a life of privilege because I have a job most often occupied by very privileged people and our job is to present aspirationality. My job, in many ways related to my physical appearance, ended up causing weight gain, hard for me as someone with lifelong body dysmorphic issues.

There have been no obvious answers to anything - getting rid of one expense increases another or makes another business opportunity impossible. Paying one bill makes paying another one impossible. After years of listening only to critiques of myself, I’m starting to understand I am doing the best I possibly can given the circumstances. But knowing that and feeling that are two different things. And constantly receiving unsolicited advice from friends and total strangers, all of which I have already thought of, is crazy-making and adds to the sense that instead of seeing a set of difficult circumstances, people see someone who’s just being lazy or entitled or stupid. Upon further investigation, I don’t think I’m any of those things. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling like I am.

For the past two months I’ve been too scared to call my mortgage company to see if my house was in foreclosure. I had been able to pause my mortgage payments for a few months but had entered into a “trial period” where I needed to pay the mortgage on time for three months, starting in November, to get back on track and begin paying the mortgage again and a certain rate.

I cannot express to you how much I want to pay my full mortgage every month, to feel like I’m holding up my end of the bargain. To feel like an upstanding person, a powerful person who makes commitments and fulfills them. But I’m in a dry period - usually the first six months of the year are dead income-wise (I should be fine by summer when work picks up and so do Airbnb rentals). Because of this lull, I haven’t been able to keep up with the mortgage repayments and one of my checks for my trial was a few weeks late. The check was never cashed so I was worried my house was in foreclosure. I don’t know how any of this works.

My mortgage company sold my loan off to a loan servicer overseas. The people who operate the phones must be doing so on really bad cell phones, so the conversations are VERY hard to understand. There is also a ten-second delay, so when you ask a question you don’t get a response for ten seconds, and when you get it it’s hard to understand what they are saying. I have an immense amount of respect for anyone who speaks more than one language - I speak only English and it is my goal to learn another language before I die (I keep waiting to have the time and space to do so, to be out of survival mode so I can practice learning). That being said, I cannot really understand much of what the people working for the mortgage company are saying because of the low quality phone line and their very thick accents. Additionally, they are only able to speak form a script, so it is nearly impossible to figure out what is going on with your mortgage in a situation like mine. So if you’re already operating from a point of fear about losing your house and with it four years of soul-crushing, back-breaking, isolation-inducing work, the idea of talking to someone you can’t understand who can’t tell you anything off script, on a ten second delay, sounds like a recipe for a panic attack (and has led to a few for me in the past).

But my friends, some of whom are going through similarly challenging life moments, have made a rule with each other: one hard thing a day. Instead of trying to do everything, lower the bar to ONE HARD THING. I get that it’s a luxury I can do this, I know people at corporate jobs with equally or much more stressful situations cannot necessarily do that. But those people also have health care and reliable paychecks, so that’s the trade, that’s the pay off.

On Monday last week, my ONE HARD THING was to finally call my mortgage company and figure out what was going on with my mortgage. I was convinced I was losing my house, that all the time and money I’d put into it was going to be lost. That my greatest fears would be realized. Someday I’d be a seventy year old with no tangible assets, struggling to get by. The reason I am risking so much right now is that I want a secure future as an older person - I may not have kids or family to help me. I may, still, be all alone in tackling the world.

I was too scared to make the call alone so I asked my friend Jacob to sit with me while I did it - something about just having another person there to bear witness felt comforting. I went over to his apartment and he sat with me on the phone while I called about my mortgage. I have done almost everything alone the past four years and at this point I just felt like I needed some backup. Asking for help and for what I need - that’s another thing I’m trying to do this year. And I’m getting a bit better at it though it’s still really hard.

Jacob began physically shaking when I called the mortgage company and put them on speaker. He got more and more anxious as the hold time increased to more than twenty five minutes, a series of nonsensical micro-ads about things the mortgage company could do to help people in financial crisis interspersed with assurance someone would be there to help at any moment.

“Jacob, it’s okay. Thank you for sitting here with me while I do this. It feels so much easier with you here,” I told him. I was just so thankful he was willing to do this for me.

“I know,” he said, “but this is making me so fucking anxious. I can’t handle this waiting and not knowing what’s going to happen.”

“This has been most of the past four years for me,” I responded, truthfully.

Finally, I got on the phone with someone from the mortgage company. The conversation was long and stilted. Jacob instantly understood what I’d explained before - the anxiety of trying to understand them, the terror of the silence in those ten second delays. Still, I was so thankful he was with me. It was so much less scary not alone. I do everything alone. I make all the scary decisions of life, alone. And sometimes, most of the time, that is awfully lonely and overwhelming. For someone as self-doubting as me, to be in charge of so many different types of business, so many logistical decisions, and more than one house is a lot. I feel not built for this, but I’m also ambitious. My life, my personality, my striving are all contradictions that don’t make sense. People are an amalgamation of different things that aren’t always congruent. I am too, for sure.

The call, after the excruciating hold period ended, was probably only fifteen minutes. And the news was GOOD! Somehow, some way, my house was not in foreclosure. Relief, overwhelming and warm, washed over my body, my eyes glazed over with joy. Not tears, just moisture, clarity, the ability to breathe for a second. I would have to start paying on my trial period again (meaning I need to pay the mortgage on time for three months before re-entering my regular pay schedule) April 1, 2024.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am. That wasn’t the outcome I’d been fearing. The outcome I’d been fearing was that I’d owe $80,000 or more in past-due mortgage payments. I don’t have that, I spent all my savings buying the house and getting it ready to rent out. So that wouldn’t be an option for me.

I felt so much relief that day. I had over a month to collect the money I needed to pay the mortgage again. And luckily, my house had been renting out a lot. My Airbnb at Yosemite (in the home I own, the one being mentioned here) is rented out for almost the entire month of March. And April and summer are booking up fast. Things were really looking up, I was going to make it after all!

It turned out, doing the ONE SCARY THING on Monday paid off. It assuaged my fear and showed me that if I tackle things, sometimes they will turn out in a way that is good for me instead of a way that makes me feel like an idiot who made yet another bad decision (the most common outcome I’ve been getting lately). Relief. I feel so lucky that my house is still mine. That the time and money that I have put into it are still there. I have no idea what happens in a foreclosure but I’m assuming it’s not as advantageous as selling the house in good standing would be (I bought for around $600k and the house is worth around a million now, and no I cannot refinance because my credit is AWFUL and I have a really good rate already).

I was also so thankful to Jacob for sitting with me. It is such a gift to not have to do that ONE SCARY THING alone.

In addition to my house not being in foreclosure, I have a roommate right now. I’ve looked into renting a studio apartment somewhere but every time I do the math of moving and getting the new place shoot ready the it doesn’t work. Prices have gone up so much in LA that I wouldn’t save enough money to make up for the expense of moving. And yes, I finally have heat in my LA place for all those who have asked (that’s a story for another day).

In this instance, doing the ONE SCARY THING really paid off. And I’d encourage you if you’re in a similar state of overwhelm to lower the bar for yourself, breaking tasks up into different days and then letting yourself not think about it. Doing one thing is so much better than doing absolutely nothing because you’re so paralyzed with fear. So many of my friends are struggling right now. And my struggles are no more or less important or real than theirs (or yours, perhaps). Some are struggling with balancing childcare and work. Some art dealing with setbacks and budget cuts at work. Some are struggling with family deaths. All of these things are real, the things you are dealing with are real - some situations are inherently stressful and can’t be thought away. We have this sense that because we may not be starving or homeless in a third world country our problems aren’t valid. But in the scheme of your own life, you can be - no, you have to be - the one to decided whether something is a struggle or not. Don’t judge yourself for feeling overwhelmed by something. Try and find strategies to deal with those struggles in manageable bits that are small enough to digest in one sitting. Try to do just ONE SCARY THING per day. If you can do more, more power to you! Bite off as much as you can chew, starting with the smallest amount and working your way up!

On Thursday I had a guest check in to my Yosemite Airbnb. Because I’m so far away I have a property manager who manages the cleaning team and getting guests in and out of the home. For this, I pay them a large percentage of the rental rate. I do this because I am too far away and often get too busy with work to be as attentive as I’d need to be with guests. I want people to have a top-notch experience at my house with high-end concierge style service. For this reason, I went with a more expensive, more boutique management firm that is VERY good at personalized customer service. But for this reason I do not interact with the guests - I am too distracted with work to be as attentive as need be and I am also paying someone else a lot to do it.

Friday afternoon I got a call from the property manager. Bad news, the guest complained of fumes and so the manager had a heating tech come to the house to check on the heating system. Unfortunately, the furnace, which is original to the house and I had fixed and updated upon moving in, was leaking propane. The guest had to be evacuated and I am so thankful they are okay. I had no idea that anything was happening with the heating - I was just up there prepping the house and making it perfect for guests last week and it was working perfectly.

The bad news? The heating system will need to be replaced. The base price for the unit to replace it is about $4000. Installation and removal of the old heater is somewhere between $1500 - $2500. March is pretty much fully booked but I will likely have to cancel the reservations, money I was relying on, until the heater is fixed and the house deemed safe again. So I may lose literally all the money I was relying on to get by this month. That’s a very real possibility.

I have $1483 in my bank account. I just paid a ton of bills and debts this past week, trying to get back in good financial standing and repair my credit.

This is obviously not great news. But after being blamed for being unhappy for the past four years, in circumstances and challenges almost identical to this one, I refuse to be unhappy anymore. Instead, I am taking a breath before I do my ONE SCARY THING on Monday. That scary thing is going the figuring out what to do about the heater, where to find the money to fix it (maybe they have financing even with my terrible credit?). I’ve already asked for an official bid from the heating tech who deemed the unit unusable. So I’ve taken that first step in solving the problem. But until I know more I am just putting that scary thing in a box and I will deal with it another day when my brain feels clearer and I feel less depressed and overwhelmed.

The next step is finding the money to fix it. The next step is yet another scary thing to deal with. But I can do it, I know I can.

Just ONE SCARY THING at a time…

Post-Essay Caveat: Please think long and hard before providing unsolicited advice in your comments. I really appreciate the engagement but often I get a LOT of unsolicited advice, most of which either doesn’t or cannot apply to my situation OR something that I have already considered and realized wouldn’t work. For example, I often get advice that’s like “you can apply for a low interest credit card to cover the expense then pay it off when you get rentals!” (I can’t, I’ve tried, bad credit). So before providing any advice, please please PLEASE make sure you know it’s something I may not have thought of that actually will apply to me. Because my wheels have been spinning on overdrive for YEARS and I have thought of everything. Getting rid of my LA place and selling everything and living with friends? Throught of it. Selling the house? Thought of it. If you have REALLY NOVEL advice I’m all ears, but please be mindful that I am a decently intelligent person and have definitely thought of all the most obvious solutions already. Thank you so much for reading and for your continued support.