In the past year as I’ve gotten much busier with school, lacrosse, slam poetry and everything with friends and family, I find myself forgetting more than ever. Parents, teachers and sometimes even counselors who fail to understand the full extent of the business of my life tend to push aside my constant anxieties. The pressure from my superiors to get good grades and also be a great friend is just too much.
The never-ending carousel of tasks in my mind makes me enter a room with the clear intention of what I am there to do and in the next few seconds completely forget why I’m even there. As this year speeds by, I remember my parents constantly demanding me to do better, saying things like “I got good grades, why are you struggling so much?”
I’m at a place where at both school and home I will turn on autopilot and just do work without even processing what it is I’m actually learning, so when tests come around, I struggle. In this past month there have been several times where I have been doing homework, and my mom would try and talk to me for five minutes, and I didn’t even notice because I was so focused on school, unable to stay in the present. Just the other day in my math class I was taking a quiz, and as I was doing it, I recognized the questions because they were nearly identical to those I did on the homework, but I couldn’t remember how I had done the problems because I didn’t retain any of the information.
There have been so many days in this past month where I’ve been merely going through the motions only to look at my work later and realize I don’t remember doing it. I have this consistent looming feeling of stress that inevitably lowers my quality of education.
Because I am always so overwhelmed, the only thing I want to do is sleep. I have gotten to the point where I go to bed at 7 p.m. just so I don’t have to focus on the present, and I never spend any time with my family. Society teaches us to sit quietly in class all day, and when we speak up about our problems, it seems that we are always silenced. Adults expect us to take in all this information, but our brains are overflowing and the knowledge ends up getting lost in the hustle of things.
I never feel like I have any time to do the things I enjoy doing. Instead, I sit and think about things that I have no control over.
Now I spend my time trying to focus on the things that truly make me happy: writing, running and reading. I also keep up with school and friends by forcing myself to make time by keeping a schedule. I try and choose not to center things on my anxiety by pushing it down and fixating on the things that allow me to smile each day like joking around with my friends and staying on task.
On days when things feel overwhelming, I lean on my family and explain how I’m perceiving things; every night at dinner when we talk about our days, each of us spend around 20 minutes trying to make one another feel better. I remember one night at the dinner table when my mom realized the full extent of the things I was dealing with and then I felt like I could finally breathe again. I’m finally starting to sense the stress of everything slip away.
What is your biggest stress causer? Let us know in the comments below.
