There’s Still Pee on the Floor: Anxiety, Overwhelm, and Being Highly Sensitive in a World That Won’t Slow Down

Cowboy. 13 weeks. Still peeing on everything.

I haven’t published a blog in a while.
Not because I haven’t had anything to say, but because everything has felt like too much.

Division. Anger. Prices. Just… life.
A constant, low-level dread.

The kind of anxiety that never really turns off. It just stays.
The kind of overwhelm where your body is waiting for the next bad thing.
Another headline. Another shift. Another thing that doesn’t make sense.

And now, the United States is at war in the Middle East again.

And then last Saturday morning at 10 am, I found myself in a room full of puppies.

My first “puppy kindergarten” class.
For an hour, I didn’t think about the war.
I didn’t think about the world falling apart.

I watched these little beings of all different sizes trip over their own feet, wrestle, bond with their people, all of us united by one very real shared experience:

pee. so much pee. 3 am, middle of the day. inside, outside. it’s a lifestyle now.

There’s something oddly grounding about a room full of adults who have all recently stepped in something they weren’t quite prepared for.

The Smallest One in the Room

My pup, Cowboy, is 13 weeks old.

He’s the smallest one in his puppy class. By a lot.
Surrounded by two Goldens, a Doberman, a pit mix, an absolutely huge Bernese Mountain Dog… all of them bigger, louder, and very sure of themselves.

And he just… goes for it.
Runs straight into the chaos. Plays anyway. Figures it out as he goes.

It’s kind of hard not to respect that.

He’s one of ten survivors from a litter of twelve.
His mom, Darlene, was a very pregnant homeless pug rescued in the LA area. She gave birth a week later at Northwest Dog Project here in Oregon.

His dad?
Good question. He’s a mystery midnight visitor. Which feels about right.

I’ve never liked pugs.
And yet here I am. The full-time caregiver of a little black pup with four white socks and absolutely no respect for clean floors.

There’s still pee on our floor. A lot of it.

We brought home a 9-week-old puppy.
The youngest I’ve ever had.
The first actual puppy in about two decades. Which says a whole hell of a lot.

Five months after our little old guy, Fenwick, died.
Same month. Same day.

I wrote about him before.
He was his own kind of dog. Steady. Known. Ours for a long time.

This is not that.

There are still moments where I wonder, what the hell did I just sign up for?

And then he runs his little romping puppy run.
He launches himself across the yard like a tiny maniac. He jumps. He pounces.
He gets the zoomies, chasing our 8-year-old mini poodle around and around the tree like his life depends on it.

He looks at everything like it’s brand new. Because it is.

And for a moment, just a moment, everything else drops away.

Not fixed.
Not solved.
Just in the moment. Quieter.

When Anxiety and Overwhelm Don’t Turn Off

If you’re someone who feels things deeply, or someone who already lives with anxiety, you probably know this feeling.

Your brain doesn’t shut off easily.
You notice everything.
You feel everything.

And right now, there’s a lot to notice.

A lot of the women I work with are exhausted.
Not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, morally exhausted.

And underneath that exhaustion, there’s something else I keep hearing:

They feel defeated.

Not in a dramatic way.
More like a slow erosion.

They did what they were told would work.
They recycled.
They worked hard.
They went to school.
They built careers.
They tried to create something stable.

There was this quiet optimism underneath it all.
That if you showed up and did your part, things would more or less make sense.

And now?

Another war.
Decisions being made that feel rushed, reactive, or just… disconnected from real human impact.

It’s disorienting.

Not just politically, but emotionally.

Because it shakes something deeper than opinions.
It shakes trust.

Why Highly Sensitive People Feel This So Deeply

Highly sensitive people don’t just “overreact.”

They take in more.
And it doesn’t just stay in your head. It lands in your body.

As anxiety.
As overwhelm.
As that constant background hum that never quite turns off.

And here’s the part that matters:

Your nervous system can’t live like that all the time.

It’s not built for constant input, constant fear, constant urgency.

At some point, it needs interruption.

Small Moments That Actually Help (Even If They Don’t Fix Anything)

For me, right now, that interruption looks like this 13-week-old little chaos creature who doesn’t care about global events and just peed on the rug again.

For someone else, it might be:

sitting outside for five minutes, doing absolutely nothing but breathing
watching your dog lose its mind over a squirrel
laughing with a friend about something dumb
noticing something real and ordinary right in front of you
simply tasting your tea

These moments don’t fix the world.

They don’t undo what’s happening.

But they do give your system a bit of a break from carrying the weight of this insane world.

And still, I find myself at puppy kindergarten.

Still cleaning up pee.
Still showing up.
Still recycling, even when part of me wonders if it matters.

Because maybe it does.

And maybe the point isn’t whether it fixes everything.

One of my favorite bumper stickers has always been:

Think globally, act locally.

Lately, that feels less like a cliché and more like a survival strategy.

I can’t control global decisions.
I can’t make sense of all of it.

But I can show up here.

I can take care of this small, chaotic creature.
I can step outside.
I can choose, in small ways, not to shut down.

That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening.

It means not abandoning yourself in the middle of it.

Tomorrow is puppy kindergarten class #2.

Cowboy will be the smallest again.
Surrounded by two Goldens, a standard poodle, a Doberman, a pit/heeler mix, and the Bernese. All of them bigger, more certain, but curious about our little ball of fire.

They’ll run.
They’ll fall over.
They’ll figure it out as they go.

And for an hour, I’ll probably forget the rest of the world again.

Not forever.
But long enough to breathe and come back to myself.

Disclaimer: Reading this blog isn’t the same as therapy. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional — you don’t have to do this alone.