The Midults’ guide to… September stress

Annabel Rivkin & Emilie Mcmeekan

CAN YOU FEEL the air freshening? Your soul sharpening? Your ambition stirring? Your focus reigniting? August is a month of suspension. We are held, as if in jelly. Freeze-framed. But what if the August hiatus spells isolation and pressure to you? Lightly insinuated but nonetheless to be endured. What if change is a requirement of hope?

September, more than any other month of the year, is about change. The new term. The sweet focus. Pleasure accompanied by ache. It’s the September feeling when we dive back into life wondering if, by next August, things might have a slightly different flavour. Hoping we might make that happen.

First we must deal with the poignancy that September delivers. The feeling, which strikes somewhere in your 30s, that the years are spinning by; that life’ s traffic is dizzyingly fast and, though the days can seem long, the years are passing in a way that ’s too whooshy to grasp. Where have the last 10 Septembers gone, gone, gone, gone (that’s a chilling echo, by the way)? How do we chart the breathless quality of time passing without panicking? But it is exactly this that motivates us to cast an autumn line out and see what bites.

The September feeling is fresh and intimidating and agile. You can be a minnow once more, about to dive back into the big pond. Replace the word ‘stressful’ with ‘exciting’ we are told. As in: the work I didn’t do during August has concertinaed up on me and I’m so excited about it. In fact, I think I’ve got excitement symptoms. I’m suffering from excitement. I hope no one can tell…

THE EYE TWITCH

‘Did you see that? Did you? See? That? Then? Just now?’ All summer your face has been just… your face. Now it’s come alive as an ex ternali sation of your madness. The eye twitch, a pulse in your jawline, a vulgarity of nervously itchy hives popping up. And you can’t even use hayfever as an excuse.

PINS AND NEEDLES...

... in the extremities. Often while driving. Loss of concentration and near misses in the car? Pins and needles. Bumping into the ex who broke your heart and pulverised your ego? Pins and needles.

PACING

Compulsive pacing. Hand-on-stomach pacing. As though holding innards in place is going to calm you down. It isn’t. Patrolling the hous e while on the phone, picking things up and putting them down. Moving things around while pacing. Putting things away. But where? Can’t find anything because of ghostly, fiddly pacing. But equally will go insane if sit still.

INVOLUNTARY, FULL-BODY SIGHING

Often done through a nO-shaped mouth. Faintly yogic. But not really. Inhaling deeply into the shoulders and then exhaling with a whoosh and a full body slump. The very picture of misery.

SWEARING AT INANIMATE OBJECTS

Fridge: ‘Stop beeping at me, you bastard. Why does everyone always want something?’ Car: ‘Just start, you bugger.’ Phone: ‘F—ing phone. F— you, phone! Oh, I need you though, you total f—er.’ You and your phone are locked in a co - dependent relationship. It ’s not healthy.

STARTING SENTENCES AND NOT FINISHING THEM

Just staring into the middle distance, murmuring something like, ‘What if we were to…’ People really hate this one. It makes them feel teased and played with. Do this too much and they’ll start to di slike you without quite being able to pinpoint why.

CLEARING YOUR THROAT

Over and over. Like you are continually making a point but there is no point to make except that you are UNEASY. You might stick your chin out and move it in strange mad-woman circles to try to release not-sure-what from not-sure-where.

You and your phone are locked in a co-dependent relationship. It’s not healthy