To Have Never Known Stress

I met a woman today at the hospital where I work part time. She is 76 years old. i’ll call her Mary for this purpose. I had interviewed her over the phone for a story I was writing, about her amazing recovery from a major heart attack. We had extensive phone conversations, longer than most interviews I do. She liked to talk. I felt like I had come to know her and so I wanted to meet her when she came for a cardiac rehabilitation session.

She seemed genuinely happy to see me when I walked in, and even gave me a hug (while walking on the treadmill no less!) Anyway, we got to talking, and she told me how based on the doctors recommendations, she had started seeing a psychiatrist at the hospital. “They say I have stress,” she said.

I laughed and said, “Ah, don’t we all!”
But then as she continued talking, I got the feeling she was really confused about it all. When I confessed to her that I too was stressed, that I  take antidepressants (they want her to try those) that it’s completely “normal” these days, she still seemed concerned.

“But what does it feel like?” she asked.

“What?”

“Stress,” she said. “what does stress feel like?”

And that’s the part that floored me. At 76, this woman had never known stress. Or if she had known it (which we can all assume she had) she did not identify it as such. Amazing, I thought. Here I am walking around stressed, and calling it stressed, nearly all the time. Even tonight, when I went to yoga class for the first time in months because yes, I was feeling stressed, i couldn’t completely relax. Toward the end we did some exercises that the instructor said were all about helping to clean out our colons. Great, I thought. For the rest of the class I was worried I was going to fart in public. Ok, I digress.

So here’s the question: Anyone else out there not know what stress feels like?