My burrito pit stop, and the stress it was masking

Working down in San Diego always felt a little surreal to me. As a Canadian, it was a place I had loved long before I ever worked there, all that unreal sunshine, the palm trees, the coastline. Somewhere in the back of my mind I half expected to see David Hasselhoff jogging down the beach to the Baywatch theme.

American work culture balanced out that postcard fast. There is a real grind to it, especially in healthcare tech. It is demanding, relentless at times, and it rarely lets up. What kept me going was the push and pull. When I managed to carve out time off, I could truly enjoy it, and when it was time to grind, which was most of the time, I still had my ways to refill the tank and keep moving.

One of the hardest moments of the day was leaving the office after dark and driving home along the main stretch. In Southern California, how do you not notice the endless lineup of Mexican places, the carne asada, the taquerias glowing in the night? I have always loved Mexican food and the culture behind it. After a long day, when my energy was shot and cooking felt impossible, I had my solution.

That was my burrito pit stop.

There was a favorite place, one I still remember clearly and have gone back to years later. I would pull through the drive-thru already knowing what I wanted. For about seven dollars you got a burrito roughly the size of my femur, and it was guaranteed to taste good. Even now, just thinking about it makes my mouth water, the smell of carne asada, the warmth of the tortilla, and do not get me started on the sauces.

It became something I looked forward to a couple of times a week. That brief pause between work and home. Bringing it back, unwrapping it, eating it slowly. It was not just food. It was a reward, a small familiar comfort after long hours. It filled my stomach, but it fed something else too, a sense of nostalgia and routine, a feeling that everything was okay.

Here is what I could not see at the time. The burrito was never really about hunger. It was the one calm moment in a day I did not know how to put down. I have always had a hard time knowing when to cut off work, telling myself the work would still be there tomorrow while I ruminated about all of it on the drive home, on top of the high-paced technical pressure I was already carrying. The pit stop got me into a calmer mood, but that calm was temporary, because the stress underneath it never actually went anywhere.

Looking back with the lens I use now, that burrito was doing for my stress what ibuprofen does for an ache. It masked the signal. It did not touch the cause. And a masked signal is easy to keep masking, because it works. Convenience quietly turns into habit, and you stop questioning it precisely because it is doing its job.

That is the part I want to be honest about. I did not catch it and change course. I normalized it. I told myself it was justified, and maybe in a single moment it was. But I carried that same habit into every job that followed, whatever the stressor happened to be, for years, without ever thinking anything was wrong. It was part of how I stayed at the top of my game for so long, by quietly sacrificing myself. In my own reflection, one slice among other things I ignored, it was part of the road to my heart attack.

None of that is the burrito's fault. The burrito was a signal I chose to quiet instead of read. What it was really pointing at was something I would not look at for a long time. I had no healthy boundaries, and when you have no boundaries you slowly stop respecting yourself, and the cost of that compounds.

The real work, when I finally did it, was not about food at all. It was regaining my own self-respect and identity. That can start as small as saying no to something. Declining an offer. Leaving work when it is time to leave, and not carrying home the fact that someone else is unhappy with you. So much of it is the fear of being rejected, of someone feeling let down, until you are living the way other people want to see you instead of the way you decide to. Building an intentional, healthy boundary around yourself is where the balance actually comes back.

So if I could hand one thing to someone standing at their own version of that drive-thru, it would be this. Acknowledge the stress before it gets out of control, and do something intentional about it, not something that only quiets it for the night. Your version might not be a burrito. It might be the pour, the scroll, or the takeout you reach for without thinking, because it works. There is nothing wrong with comfort. The question is whether it is still a reward, or whether it has quietly become the thing you use to avoid looking.

I will still go back to San Diego someday, back to that same spot, and I will probably order the same thing. I still love my burrito pit stop. The difference now is that I know what it is, a reward in its proper place, and not a substitute for facing what was actually wrong. Because it is always in the reflection that you finally see the light.

~ Foster