It’s been a rough year…for everybody. Even if you were lucky enough to have minimal or no damage in Hurricane Matthew, we all had front row seats to the destruction of our beautiful coastal towns. Then, not even a year later, we see Harvey horrify Houston and hold our breathe for two weeks of weather reports telling us to prepare for the worst storm Planet Earth has ever seen.

We’re exhausted. We’re scared. We’re down. I have had numerous women write, call, or stop me in stores to tell me how down they feel. One lady wrote, “This feels completely different. It feels like I cannot breathe, like I am being suffocated with the heaviness of the situation. I feel like crying all the time.” And this was almost 10 days after Irma had passed. What we have experienced is real and has definitely taken a toll on our spirits.

There’s an epidemic going around. You can call it overload, overwhelm, or overstimulation. Whatever you call it, the truth is, we, meaning our entire society, have too much going through our heads and not enough boundaries, or quiet time to keep it at bay. In fact, quiet time may be a thing of the past, which means our brains can’t concentrate.

There are tons of people who declare they “have” to sleep with the TV on. I have friends who get texts from their bosses at midnight or five o’clock in the morning. People, especially teenagers, sleep with their phones. When I was young, if we would have pulled our wall phones into bed with us, somebody would have taken us to a doctor, or spanked us and taken it away for a week or two.

In 1988 George H. W. Bush called for a kinder, gentler nation and I believe he was on to something. While our nation is now at the most unkind and most ungentle it’s ever been, I have adopted Bush’s vision for a kinder, gentler life.

As you all know, perhaps ad nauseam, this past year has been a beast for me with a series of one terrible thing after another. There were many days that I went to bed as soon as I got home from work and had to drag myself out to face the next day. I was exhausted both mentally and physically. I was beaten up, beaten down, beaten inside and out. My entire being was bruised to the core. I felt like a pinball being jerked here and there, and when I just wanted to slip down the hole to oblivion, I would get caught by the flippers and slapped back for more.
I had taken so much and faced so much and stood up for so much, I finally realized none of this was going to kill me, and I had the power to be the conductor of the trauma and drama. I hadn’t grown numb to it, I had decided to not step into the boxing ring anymore. I was fine with having a conversation with someone on the sideline, but I refused to lace up my gloves and engage in the fight. I decided I had been beaten up enough, and I wanted a kinder, gentler life. I actually needed a kinder, gentler life, or I was going to go down for the count and possibly not get back up.

The last 12 months have been dreadful. As I skim back over them, and I truly don’t want to do anything more than a swift skim, there just aren’t a whole lot of good memories. Without rehashing the series of unfortunate events, because I am not a complainer and I’m over it, the fact is, one of my fondest memories is having a colonoscopy. It’s pathetic, but true.

However, even in the midst of bad, badder, baddest, worse, worst year ever, my health was still on my radar—along with waterproof mascara. The American Cancer Society (ACS) recommends men and women with no family history, or prior colon issues, get a colonoscopy at age 50, because apparently, turning 50 isn’t humbling enough in and of itself. Right when your knees start aching, pounds start clinging like plastic wrap that’s doubled over on itself and often you have no idea why you walked into the kitchen, but you eat a few cookies just so it wasn’t a wasted trip, the ACS recommends for us to bend over and take it.

There are some things about our visitors to the Lowcountry that make me shake my head. But before I go into my hissy fit, I want to take a moment to thank the kind and respectful people who visit the Lowcountry. We are all aware that you make a positive impact on our economy, help keep our businesses thriving, and allow us to continually make improvements to our small piece of paradise. So with that said, please know the rest of this article is with all due respect, as it refers to those tourists who even tourists call tourist.