The Unintended Consequences of Adulting

As someone who grew up under complex circumstances, I have long prided myself on an ability to maintain the delicate balances necessary for being an adult.  At some point (for legal reasons: after 21), my motto for approaching stress became, "I don't do [blank] because it might disrupt my careful homeostasis created by caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and melatonin". 

While some people don't understand the logic of this statement, many of my peers and colleagues have the nuance to know why I respond to stress in this way. Or in the words of John Mulaney, "What is someone gonna do to me that's worse than what I would do to myself?"

However, sometimes, my good intentions turn out to be possible compulsions once I can reflect on decisions I've made with little thought. Such as when I purchased a case (or two) of one of my favorite energy drinks at a discount store. A place I usually go to find niche products that I can't find elsewhere in Pensacola.

At the time, I thought, "This is the perfect metaphor for the height of adulting!" 

I had found a product I loved, at a cheaper price than grocery retail prices, and I would have enough cans to make it through another month of office work.

I'm a business researcher. I'm a social scientist. I think I usually make pretty good financial decisions.

But as I shared this "accomplishment" with a few friends, they began to ask, "Jack, do you think this is a trauma response?" Which creates the subsequent question of, "Did something happen to you recently that could have been a trigger for this action?"

Could there have been a trigger in my day-to-day life of office work mixed with researching weird topics and then staying out till 3am drinking club soda? Statistically...yes. Yes, there's probably a trigger in there somewhere.

The interesting thing though in this reflection through multiple people was drastically different views on what kind of trauma could have caused this response. In the view of one person, they remarked on their own childhood of food insecurity. How buying in bulk still impacts them to this day and is something that their spouse cannot understand. For someone else, it was the active trauma of the pressures of their current job and having to turn to substances (in a likely abusive way) to get through each shift.

For me, I realized it wasn't about food or success or depression. It was stemming from a comment someone made about how drinking massive amounts of caffeine is the exact same thing as alcoholism. And I'm sensitive to mentions, or rather accusations, of alcoholism because of my upbringing.

To the point that I once snapped, in public, at a professional acquaintance who had decided to jokingly call me an alcoholic in front of people who may not have known me well enough to understand his joke. I don't like people taking my trauma of losing people to substance abuse and turning it into a way to embarrass me in public.

So in this case, casual comments from a colleague, comparing my caffeine consumption to something that caused me to lose the most important person in my life, was just a step too far. Something that should have been obvious to another early-career professional who went through HR classes recently.

If psychology classes are part of the distant past for some readers, let me remind you that everyone reacts differently to stress and trauma. What seems like an inconsequential remark to one person can be a major trigger for another. I think more professionals would benefit by remembering the individual nature of experiences so they can approach their communities with more empathy and understanding.