Stressful situation proves that nobody's perfect

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:17:50 GMT

By Erinn Taylor

I recently had a bit of a freak out. I had spent a Saturday on a college visit and had a great time. Unfortunately, I came home Sunday to a weekend’s worth of homework and family in town. Thus, I spent the first half of my Sunday at my grandma’s house, hanging out with the relatives. Fast forward to five o’ clock that evening when I was getting home to just as much homework and prepare for some major freak out. I was actually productive at first. I finished all of my AP Psychology and AP Statistics homework before moving onto my newspaper editorial, which I had been putting off because I was not sure yet what I wanted to write about. Still feeling good, I choose a topic that I was pretty sure I could rant about for a while, and I went with it. Three pages later, I was feeling pretty good, ready to e-mail it to myself so I could print it in the morning. Then, disaster struck. It was pretty stupid of me actually; I tried to e-mail my document without saving it first. When my attempt at e-mailing did not work, I could not return to the paper I had failed to save, all three pages of it. Cue the freak-out. Everything I had been working on for the past couple of hours was gone, and I still had a test to study for and a shower to take. Here’s when I saw the social psychology unit we had just studied in AP Psychology take shape. "Projecting" is when you take out your emotions, good or bad, on some innocent bystander. In this case, the innocent bystander was my mother. I went to her, freaking out, and after finding out how dumb I had been about saving my article, she understandably got upset, which only made me madder. At what, I don’t know. So, I found myself at eleven at night trying to figure out what to do with myself. I needed sleep and a shower, but I also needed to write and study. It does not take a genius to guess that sleeping came last in the priorities. This is how it goes with many high school students these days. We try to juggle so many things – college stuff, AP work, social lives, and sports – that it is only natural that something eventually will give, especially when you get as little sleep as many high school students get. My parents always make light of my complaining, saying that they already went through all of this, but I have to disagree. The world is a much different place than it was 30 years ago. Colleges are more expensive and competitive, teachers expect more out of their students, and coaches expect student-athletes to give their all to the season. In short, we are supposed to give 110 percent to everything and still manage to be happy, good kids. Usually, I can live with this expectation. I do what I can with what I have and make an effort not to stress out. However, sometimes the tasks at hand can be so intimidating I choose to sit, freak out and accomplish nothing. This is where I found myself at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night with a laundry list of tasks to complete, no time to finish them, and a desperate need for sleep. A nervous breakdown was impending if I did not do something. So, I sat down, and I began to write. And magically, I began to feel better. I wrote about how I felt. I told my story. My column became a diary entry, in which I spilled out my sorry situation and tried to figure out what to do. Writing has always been therapeutic to me. Being able to spill my soul onto a piece of paper makes me feel in control of my situation. On this page, my problems are in black and white. My situation was luckier than I could have imagined. I may have been stuck late at night with too many jobs for the time I had, but at least I was stuck with a task that would help me pull myself together for the rest of the night. As I finished writing, I found myself feeling in control of my situation. I had finished my first job, and now all I had left before a shower and sleep was studying for a test that did not seem so scary anymore. Although I will never be perfect, I know I can handle my stress. I can try to give 110 percent to everything, and when I fail, that will be okay too. Because I am only human, as long as I do my best, that is enough.