Dear Midterms Warriors,

I'm sitting in a full library right now. The latecomers walk in and leave after a lap, realizing that all of the tables are full. Starbucks coffee cups, highlighters and MacBooks adorn the desks of all of us who are about to face the storm of expectations.

That's all these tests and papers really are: expectations. They are knowledge we should be able to reproduce, theories we should have mastered and the ideas we should be able to generate. We are vigilantly and vigorously preparing—some of us more than others—for this impending onslaught of measurement.

During this week that awakens our nervous systems and makes so many of us sacrifice precious hours of sleep, I prompt you to take a breath between your sips of coffee and realize: this stress is artificial. Yes, it matters. Yes, we all feel it. However, we don't have to let it become real.

We have food to eat, friends to talk to, family to complain to, and a safe place to sleep at night. Whether we meet the expectations set out before us this week or not, we will be fine.

You can't change how much you have to do, what you have to do, or how much time you have to do it, but you can change how you think about the urgency of it and where the worry it's causing you is coming from.

We fear failure; we fear we will not meet the expectations set for us. This fear comes from calculated metrics of achievement, not metrics of survival. Indeed, most of us here are type A personalities (to some extent) who have paired survival with achievement our entire lives, but that doesn't mean we should confuse the two.

You might push back against this, arguing that passing your economics midterm is crucial to your future.

This is not true. Passing that midterm is (at best) potentially crucial to one certain, imagined version of a future. The things that are crucial to your future, as a person, have very little to do with that midterm and much more to do with your physical health. I promise you. Spend your time this week remembering that.

Failure in this context is something that manifests itself on a piece of manufactured paper, not something that will ever physically be part of the world. You'll still be you, no matter what happens. Thus, it is an artificial stress—one that only becomes real if we fail to remember that and let it sneak in and infiltrate our physical world of real-time stressors.

So, work as hard as you can and meet as many expectations as possible, but don't imbue a potential letter written on a piece of paper with the power to make you feel real-world distress.

Sincerely,

Your fellow Sunday library-goer