The year I turned 30, without warning I began to see and feel the physical effects of stress. Prior to this, I prided myself on being able to handle stress so well that my body didn’t even realise it was under stress. I worked for a startup where the burden of leadership was thrust upon me at a very young age but I lived for it, stress was something other people talked about.

In the short years following my 30th birthday stress is something I think about often. I worry about how to manage it and stress about being stressed. This has led to amplified anxiety because I am not 100% sure about what it is I am actually stressing about, until now.

At a recent dinner with a friend I had not seen in four years I confessed that the last 10 years I have lived in quiet anger. I am angry all the time, and I didn’t know why until a few months ago, I said. Anger that only truly began in manifest itself when I turned 30 and exploded in the last two months.

As I tucked into a well flavoured serving of Lamb Rogan Josh, at my favourite Indian restaurant nestled in the basement parking of my local mall, he narrated his last four years and how he had taken himself out of society to reboot. He talked about needing to address his mental health and his life and truly begin taking care of himself, at 35 he realised he had put his life on hold, for everyone else and the world. I watched him explain between bites, in his animated expressions and sometimes soft spoken tone, and realised that just like me, and probably countless others, he too suffered from the burden of caring. His was not manifested in anger like mine, more a sense of loss of himself, but both feelings came from the same place were sacred into stress.

This notion has plagued me for some weeks now and was reaffirmed hours before the above dinner, with a colleague when we both languished about climate change our powerlessness to truly make a difference, even though we are trying. As a generation we have so much on our minds and the stress of the world is weighing us down. I think of that scene in Big Little lies, where the daughter of Laura Dern’s character has a panic attack because she is worried about the environment. We are her, all the time. On a continent like Africa, where two thirds of the population are under the age of 35, the burden of fixing what is broken is on us because there is no one else.

We think about climate change, healthcare, politics, leadership and socio economic issues at a deep level, or at least we should. As the population that does indeed have the majority to vote in new leadership we ask ourselves if through our choices ‘are we fucking up as a generation?’ Is the price of wokeness the stress of having to wonder if we can we afford our lives or are our actions the right ones? We worry about geopolitical issues, the fiscal crisis and our personal and more nuclear burdens. It is too much for one person to constantly care, to want to make a difference and fight every injustice, which leads us to drown in our panic trying to claw our way out.

The world is so broken, it is always 10min to midnight. The Armageddon clock ticks. We are living longer but will our stress and our burdens allow us to survive? We are stressed about the environment, we are stressed about unemployment, we are stressed about housing, we are stressed about our safety and security, we are stressed this planet cannot sustain our expanding population. We are stressed that we the youth put leaders in power who threaten the very freedoms they are meant to guard. We want to make a difference, there is no one else that will save us, we have no choice but to save ourselves. There are not enough people left in the elusive “older generation” and the buck can no longer be passed. This is a stressful thought. We likely find ourselves under the rain dance of a warm shower simulating companionship in the water’s warmth because our amplified anxieties push us to loneliness.

We are stressed about how we deal with depression and how we are allies to friends and family who suffer from depression. Yet the systems in place are inadequately prepared to help us navigate the things we are feeling now that we have given them names. I am stressed that I cannot truly move on from the losses of my past. Even when I move forward, everyone else has moved on better than me and I stay in loss, even loss itself moves on without me. I am stressed about my carbon footprint and I worry no matter how many trees I have planted I have irreversibly damaged this planet. I am stressed about the possibility that I may die from a disease the world doesn’t truly understand, a disease caused by stress. It feels like the world is at war with itself, nature, economics, society and humanity. The Amazon is on fire. I am stressed as a black woman, dealing with burden of prejudice, hatred and a generation of black women that most save themselves and the people around them.

As a generation we are burdened by the world we live in, we are burdened by so much wokeness that is stressing us. We should care, and we must be woke, but how do we manage the stress that comes with it? How do we not let the broken world, break us?