We sometimes lose ourselves to ourselves. That perhaps sounds odd, but if you take a moment and work up the courage to honestly assess your choices and your overall happiness, you might realize how often you get in the way of yourself. I am constantly telling people that college is defined by stress, that you have not experienced stress until you have experienced the whirlwind that is college.
Now don't get me wrong; college certainly brings some of our greatest experiences to us, along with delivering our hardest and most profound lessons. We learn the difference between a real friend and someone who can fake friendship. We learn when to follow our hearts and when to follow our minds. We learn how to take responsibility for our actions. We learn about laundry (well, not everyone). However, all the while we are learning these essential life lessons, we are under a lot of stress.
When you're in high school, life feels simple and the path to the future you want seems clear and clean-cut. A few reality checks later and you begin to learn that challenges and roadblocks are a fairly consistent part of life. Some people behave manically under stress, while others are practically suffocated into a comatose state by it. Stress is like a bad boyfriend who keeps you from living your life. Sometimes, stress can even change you into a version of yourself that you don't particularly like.
Occasionally, you may find yourself in this funk. Sometimes you may not realize you are in set funk until your best friend mentions how MIA you have been for an entire month, or that your Netflix account reminds you of your recent ability to watch three seasons of a show in one weekend. When you surprise yourself in a frightening way, you know you have entered what I like to call the doldrums. The doldrums are a state of inactivity, a place where you are alive, but you aren't really living.
When stress is the motivating factor in your daily life, you begin to lead a very self-absorbed life. All of your thoughts are focused solely on your potential failures and your growing frustrations and fears. You live in an anxiety-ridden, futuristic state, or you begin to long nostalgically for a simple time in your past while ignoring the moment you are presently in. This is how you lose yourself. You can lose yourself in schoolwork. You can lose yourself in a toxic relationship. You can lose yourself in your job. The ways in which we lose ourselves are endless.
Losing yourself is a lonely experience, where you are constantly indecisive, annoyed, and confused. Self-doubt becomes your natural state, and most of the things in your life slowly fall apart. This happens. It's hard not to get caught up in ourselves with the environment we are subjected to every day. However, it is essential to our pursuit of happiness and our well being that we pull ourselves out of these funks.
So how do we manage this? Well, we have to remind ourselves of who we really are and what we really want. We have to take the time to be alone. We have to take the time to laugh uncontrollably with our friends. We have to take the time to do the things that make us feel most alive, whether that's reading a good book, training for a marathon, or even seeing your favorite band live.
For me, I cured my mid-semester school breakdown with a surprise weekend trip to the beach. All I need to re-charge myself is the ocean and some good conversation with old friends. I am someone who needs to feel both independent and connected to people at the same time, and a good beach trip gives me that. People need different things, but we all need that feeling of escape that both excites us and restores us to our best selves. Without it, we are slaves to our stress, and our lives become nothing more than a series of checklists and routines. So break up with your stress and make time for the things that remind you that there is so much more to life than just surviving it.
