Stress Isn't Fun
My senior year of high school I was so excited to go off to college and do amazing and wonderful things. I was ambitious, fun, outgoing, and hardworking. I had maintained a good GPA and I received an excellent ACT score. I had a girlfriend that was going to a different school not that far away and everyone was in good health. I got into the engineering college and was one of the few accepted into aerospace. Everything was going right.
Then it wasn’t.
That summer my family found out that my father had to have invasive back surgery. We were all worried and scared. It was like going into a pitch black room, knowing something will hit you, but you don’t know when. Later in the summer our family found out that the surgery was happening the day before I moved into my freshman dorm. The day of the surgery could’ve lasted years.
The seconds felt like minutes and the minutes felt like hours.
When it was all finished, the surgery did not work. My father, after suffering a long and upsetting recovery, still to this day has to walk with a cane. But that first week of school was bad. I remember moving in that morning. It was cold and rainy and the elevators weren’t working so my mother and I had to carry all of my things up 5 flights of stairs, then it was back to the hospital. For the rest of the semester I went home 2-3 times a week to do chores around the house or help my father complete simple tasks. My mother and I still joke about how bad it would have been if I went to school far away.
I couldn’t tell if I was actually bad at engineering or I just didn’t care enough about it. My mind was set on other things.
The relationship with my girlfriend was stressed because of the distance and neither of us had cars.
I was forced to make all new friends and that was not going well at all because I was always doing school work.
My family was stressed about the health and wellness of my father and ill grandmother.
It was hard to complete all my schoolwork and make friends and help my family.
If freshman year taught me anything it taught me time management.
3 weeks into school was the worst week of my life so far. One of my best friend’s father was already ill of cancer and he passed away. He was such an important role model in my life. Always kind and patient. We loved the same activities such as piano and tennis.
He was the man I could sit down with and talk to for hours and not get bored.
A few days after his passing my other best friend’s brother was in a deadly car accident on his way to work. He was only 24 years old. He graduated college with an amazing GPA and landed a high paying job just nothing of where we grew up. In two years he had enough money to buy and apartment and a new car. He was the symbol of working hard and receiving amazing results. The amount of pain and suffering on our church community was too much to bear.
I suppressed my emotions for a long time.
I was already a fairly regular tobacco user, but I turned to alcohol to deal with my stress. I drank almost every single night for weeks. That helped my social scene in college a little bit because when I was drinking with my new friends it was exciting to get to know them, but when I wasn’t with them I was deeply deeply depressed and stressed because of all that was happening so fast and I knew I wasn’t getting my schoolwork done.
I could feel myself spiraling out of control and I wasn’t doing a thing about it.
My mother finally confronted me after checking my bank account and saw that I was blowing a lot of money on beer. That’s when the tears came, that I didn’t think I could handle all of what was going on and school.
I wanted to quit and just lay in bed forever.
I had to drop a class and my grades were sinking, fast. I finally reached out to some fraternity brothers and mentors I have had for a long time. It was hard admitting that I was struggling because I was always such a happy individual that was full of energy. I had never felt stress like this before in my life. I leaned on my old friends, family, and my girlfriend to finally finish out the semester. I ended up with a 1.9 GPA and switching to business because engineering just wasn’t for me. However, to get into the business school you need a 2.5 GPA.
I was lost in no man’s land.
My parents pressure towards me to get good grades was an increasing stressor, and still is. I didn’t make grades in the spring and took some classes over the summer while working. This past fall I worked day in and day out to manage a 3.4 GPA.
My dad has fully recovered the surgery but still cannot walk that well. My grandmother has been sent to the emergency room more than 5 times in the past 6 months and refuses to go to a nursing home so my mother and I have to take care of her and take her to all of her doctor’s appointments. Things were still stressing me out but I was learning to manage it better.
It was almost as if whenever I was beginning to manage my stress, something else would come up and beat me down. One my friends from grade school, one of the nicest boys anyone could know, was arrested by the North Korean government. The whole community that I grew up with was hit with a wave of sadness and depression. We were all wondering, and still are, if he will ever come home. Watching the video of him cry and plead to the North Korean government was one of the hardest things I have ever had to watch, thinking that this may be the last time I ever see him.
This spring semester has been one of the hardest, most stressful semesters in terms of school work. I officially get put into the college of business on the Tuesday of spring break, but if I don’t make grades this semester I am put back in no mans land. I cannot go through life constantly trying to get somewhere but never actually reaching it.
I am reaching for relief of the crippling stress but I can never grasp it.
I am trying not to fall back into old habits but sometimes it seems as if it is the only way to relieve the stress. The moral of my story is that everyone is always stressed, whether it is just a paper or assignment, or excruciating emotional pain. It is not how the stress messes with you that makes you who you are, its how you manage the stress. I try to look at every stressor as an opportunity to make myself a better person, but I cannot always be that perfect.
I never will be.