Stress is a function of the quality of life.

So the new job started this week and along with that the daily madness of waking up, getting everything from breakfast, lunch and dinner ready before I leave so I can have a few moments of peace when I come back, drop off and pick up duties etc.

But amazingly, I am actually enjoying all of this. I spent the last two or so years in a miserable job and my first break from the misery came last summer when I went to work with a group of people from my past who helped me regain my faith in people. I will take this moment to send a shout out to my manager- no names but he is one of the best people I have worked for in a while. I cannot thank him enough for being the kind of manager he is.

I will not go into the details of the nightmare I lived through for two years before I was able to break out of it, it will suffice to say that I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy and another day there would have driven me nuts.

My two years of hell along with pregnancy and postnatal hormones had all but drained me of my last drop of hope but the hopeless optimist that I am, even through all of that, I still held on to the last sliver of hope. I had a lot to be happy about during that time though. We had a new baby, Kishen got his MBA, Vivek was growing up to be a really smart kid, my sisters had kids around the same time, but although I enjoyed the moments, I could never truly feel the happiness of the moments and events. I felt like I was in a dark box, experiencing the happiness through a small window in the box. The stress of dealing with hell 8 hours a day took up my last ounce of energy and I didn’t seem to have any left to enjoy the more important things in life. I was more than obsessed with doing better, I was consumed by it. Then I realized, I was not the problem, and that was when I decided; it was time to get out of the situation.

I was struggling to find work life balance but until I got out of there I didn’t realize that there is no need to look for that balance. Work and Life are like two sides of the same coin. One does not have any validity without the other. Work is a part of your life and if stop chasing balance, life will find it for you.

So, I was elated when I got an opportunity to get out of there. I would have jumped at the first opportunity that came my way and thankfully it turned out to be at a place I loved with people I knew. I took it and that was the end of my nightmare.

It took a while for the horror to go away though. For the first few weeks, I kept feeling I was living in a dream and any moment I would wake up and realize it was all a dream. Then slowly but surely, like a tiny ray of sunshine breaking through a dark cloud cover to bring light and warmth, the realization that it was over and this was reality started to sink in.

The quality of my life was at an all time low for two years and no matter how many positive experiences I had, I stressed about everything. I wasn’t happy during a major part of the day and it messed up everything. I stressed about sleeping at night, waking up in the morning, getting ready for work, getting the kids ready, eating food, not eating food, you name it, I stressed about it.

Getting away from there was like getting CPR after being under water for a really long time. I thought I would never be able to breathe again. Thankfully I was wrong. I started breathing again. The new place worked wonders. I was able to enjoy the small things in life one more time. It took me about three months to realize that the nightmare was over but when I did, I looked at life from a new perspective.

My positive experiences resulted in a better quality of life for me and voila, the stress was gone. It’s like it was never there. It seems like a distant memory now. Its funny how our brain always brings positive experiences to the forefront and stashes away the negative ones to a far corner of memory. It was a life lesson for me. I never thought I would become skeptical but now I believe skepticism is the brain’s defense mechanism. I am not skeptical (yet) but I have learnt to take a deeper look at things.

The last few months have taken me back to the positive experiences of my past and I have arrived at a junction of the past where the future looks really good. I know it sounds crazy but it’s the truth of my life. Positive experiences of the past + super future outlook make for the best quality of life and a good quality life makes for low stress no matter how hard you are working ☺

Here’s to the positive experiences in life- may we have more of them with a sprinkling of not so good to remind us how good we have it ☺