Frayed, Frazzled, and Frustrated

Well, our car was declared a "total loss" because the cost to repair it exceeds its book value. So we need to shop for another car in a hurry. This feels so unfair because to replace the car will cost us much more than the insurance will give us. Yes, we will end up with a newer car (this was a 97 Lumina with 85K miles) but we were not ready to replace it yet - in fact we put about $1000 bucks into fixing it just a few weeks ago!

All this has all gotten me thinking about my general frustration level over the past few months. The conventional wisdom seems to be that once one suffers a genuine tragedy, everyday annoyances no longer seem important, especially if they just involve monetary loss. You are supposed to have learned not to "sweat the small stuff", right?

Only my experience is somewhat the opposite. It's more like suffering this loss has made me so emotionally depleted, lowered my resistance to such a degree, that minor problems are, at least initially, harder to handle than they used to be. I lose my cool more easily, get tremendously angry at situations even though I know they are unavoidable.

What does happen, though, is that after a while - sometimes within minutes, sometimes it takes hours or days - I am better able to put the lesser problems into perspective. After all, they are not the end of the world. I know, I've seen it. And slowly, partly through blogging, I'm working on learning to endure it.

Thanks for being there to listen.