The Bragging Right
On carrying the anxiety down to a three, and the heavier thing still underneath it
On a Friday support call, someone arrived carrying stress that wasn’t lifting.
She’d had a difficult week, real difficulty and real pressure, but two things had gone unexpectedly well. She described them as miracles, and they were. She’d let go completely at a certain point, and things had simply worked out.
But underneath the relief, the adrenaline was still running. It had always been running. She’d been working with it, releasing and releasing, and it never seemed to finish. There was just always more.
So we opened to it. Welcomed it, let it rise, gave it full permission. It came up around an 8. We went back and forth between letting it land and softening the grip. We let go of the story around it: what it meant, why it was there, what it said about her situation. The 8 became a 6, then a 3.
And then she noticed something.
“What’s moving out,” she said, “is the story that there is a lot of it. Because that’s another story, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It’s not just a story, actually. It’s a bragging right.”
She laughed. “I almost feel obliged.”
There it was.
We live inside a culture that treats stress volume as a kind of currency. Where how much you’re carrying becomes evidence that you’re working, that you matter. The person with the most on their plate has earned something, at minimum the right to complain about it. We compare. We escalate. Oh yes, I’m really stressed. Oh yes, well, I’m stressed too. I’m working 60 hours. I’m working 70.
The feeling itself may be real. But wrapped around the feeling is often something else: an account. An identity. A particular kind of pride in the weight of it.
When the label came off, when the sensations stopped being stress and became just energy moving through the body, the story of how much there was began to dissolve alongside them. Not because her circumstances had changed. Because the account was running independently of the actual sensations. The obligation to be overwhelmed. The sense that acknowledging ease meant she wasn’t working hard enough, hadn’t earned the right to feel lighter.
When she saw that, she laughed. And the 8 became a 3.