Tax Time and Other Stressors

There is another reason I am drinking lots of green tea (and coffee). I need the strength to get through our taxes.

Being a writer is stressful enough (think of facing the blank page every day) but the tax thing is a chronic worry. We have tons of unreimbursed medical expenses because of our son, and then I have the complications of my freelance work. I try to keep good notes, calendars, copies of receipts, but then when it’s time to go flying out the door to another doctor’s appointment, often I am forced to just chuck the receipts in an ever growing mess of a file, or scribble something in a calendar that will be a complete mystery to me when I look at it next.

Basically, taxes make my year a bunch of little stresses that add up to one big one right now. My sister, who is visiting, says she has never seen my office so messy—and it has been MESSY, Hurricane Katrina messy, before. I am even getting stressed jumping over the piles of receipts that are necessary for me to catalog.

I want to back up to another post I did, about the death of Dana Reeves from cancer.

This poor woman died of lung cancer at 44 and she didn’t even smoke. Sandra, in a comment, had an interesting post:

This is sad news I hadn’t heard until now. It makes me wonder how much stress had to do with her illness. She had to be strong for so long for so many, and that can be a killer.

Stress indeed can be a killer; I’ll be writing a little more about the biology of stress, and how they’ve found in clinical settings that it actually does shorten life on a cellular level.

But for the moment, I just want to address LIFE. It would be good to avoid chronic stress that is so unhealthy for our mood, for cancer, for fertility, but the rub is, we must do our taxes, go to parent-teacher conferences, pay the mortgage, work, take care of unexpected disasters, and deal with a myriad other stress-inducers.

The sad truth is, many of the ways life is structured—we need to work to live, we want to spend time with our children, we have to do our taxes, the roof is leaking—we can’t avoid stress. In the next columns, I want to address small daily ways we can help ourselves manage stress and not be dominated by it. And, should I even say it, there are instances when stress can be good for you. Stay tuned (unless I get too busy and stressed to write the next column—kidding!)

Related posts:

1. I Scored 57
2. Infertility: “It’s Not Like It’s Cancer”
3. 7 Ways to Squelch Holiday Squabbles: Tips 1-3
4. Reducing Stress During Fertility Treatment
5. STRESS Can Wear you Down– Literally

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Stress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.