Take a breath. Like seriously, get off your laptop, turn off your phone, and take a breath. You have a massive paper to write, a work shift starting in 40 minutes, 3 meetings in the evening, an internship interview later this week, 17 unread messages, 23 unread emails, and you promised your friend you’d get Chipotle for dinner.
You deserve a breath.
Make a to-do list, color code your agenda, update your Google Calendar. Do the little things that make you feel more organized yet are strangely calming. Feeling better already? Good.
You’re a smart person. You’ve worked extremely hard since you were young, and you put most of the pressure on yourself to nail your next interview, maintain the highest GPA possible, excel athletically, be a great friend, a better daughter, a grateful student, all while making it look effortless, and all the while looking poised, perfect, and just beautiful. But you know what? This isn’t all going to happen, at least not all at once.
Coming into college you were so eager to sign up for every club email list, make friends with everyone on your floor, rush a sorority, try out for a new club sport, and suck up to professors in office hours. In high school, you were involved in 101 things while being top of the class, and it all came easy to you, so college had to have been the same. And it kinda was...until it all wasn’t. Maybe it was the first time you fail a major test despite studying hours for it, or maybe it was when you volunteered to plan a major event and now it’s here and you're totally unprepared, or maybe you’re just trying to balance extra classes on top of a sport and your exec position in your sorority. And you love it but you secretly hate it because you haven’t slept more than 6 hours since winter break and are personally expected to have all the answers when you really have no clue what is going on.
Realizing you can’t do it all, that there are commitments you made that are going to fall through, that you can’t please everyone, and that, along the way, you are definitely going to piss someone off because you didn’t pull through is probably the hardest lesson to learn for the girl who tries to do too much. It’s easy to beat yourself up real bad and think you failed, but really, it just means you're human. It means you’re human enough to have limitations.
Recognizing that, just maybe, you actually want to cut back on something or take a lesser role does not mean you are failing. It means you are prioritizing, striving to keep yourself happy and sane, and trying to focus on what really matters most for you. Find your passions and take them seriously, but don’t overwhelm yourself along the way. And when you inevitably do overwhelm yourself, know it’s always okay to step back and start over. Focus on your priorities and what you can control, and know that tomorrow, there are 24 more hours to try it all over again.
