Anyone that has ever encountered me is bound to tell you that I am wound tighter than the seat of Nicki Minaj's jeans.

Trust me, that is not always the case. Believe it or not, I do have those rare moments that I can feel relaxed. Yes, they are often very brief and almost always ruined by the thought of "oh crap, I still have to do that thing that isn't due for another week," but they do happen.

No, these moments aren't the ones I spend asleep.

Silly reader, Type-A personalities never sleep. I stress in those moments too.

All self-deprecating jokes aside (although I have many and they are comic gold if I do say so myself), I have come to terms with the fact that my stress is typically self-created. I know I'm a perfectionist and I know I worry too much about things that really don't matter at the end of the day.

But this is not a twelve-step program. The first step to solving the problem is not always admitting that you have a problem. For perfectionists, admitting that your stress comes from your inability to accept "good enough" is just a Band-Aid to help you move on with your life for a few minutes. The second you rip that bandage off, you find a new pain in the reminder that you completed a project that was slightly less than your best. Telling yourself "I am a perfectionist" is not going magically cure you of this ailment. No matter how hard I try, I will always find myself getting worked up over the smallest details of the tiniest life events.

However, claiming my perfectionism as a part of my identity has helped me place some of my stress into perspective and manage the anxiety it causes.

Allow me to reference a small piece of popular culture to demonstrate my realization. I imagine that most of you have been on Facebook. In talking with friends and family, I also know that most of my audience for The Odyssey comes from Facebook. This is great, because you avid Facebook users will know exactly what I'm talking about when I reference the phrase "too blessed to be stressed".

Maybe it's just me, but I feel as if I have been seeing this phrase since I first created my Facebook account. A small part of me believes it may have been the first thing I saw on Facebook. In some ways, it's a great way to remind yourself that you live a blessed life. In other ways, it's a great way to ignore the stress and allow it to compound until you explode in an anti-productive psychotic breakdown.

Okay, maybe that's a little too far.

My point is, I know what works for me and that saying, quite frankly, doesn't cut it. Instead of pushing off my stress because it blocks me from the blessings in my life, I like to remind myself that most of my stress is caused by the things that I love. I find the hardest time letting go of my perfectionism when I am dealing with and stressing over something that I am passionate about, something that I consider a blessing in my life.

For example, I was one of a few people helping organize and host the third annual Kilos for Kofkin charity powerlifting event this past February. This is an annual event that the High Point University Club Powerlifting team hosts in honor of Hastings Kofkin, a young man that mean quite a lot to our former captain.

I knew that I was taking on a lot when I became captain of the team and I knew that this meet would be the most important thing I did for the team all year. As if the success of two previous events did not place enough pressure on me, this year's proceeds were donated to the nonprofit To Write Love on Her Arms.

In addition to organizing and advertising the event for months in advance, I also competed in the meet and entertained my friends, family, and boyfriend.

Needless to say, I was under a lot of pressure.

For weeks leading up to the event, I began to sleep less and less each night. I stressed about how I would manage the time spent advertising for the event with my training, my schoolwork, and my other extracurricular investments. My writing began to fall to the wayside for a while and that's when I knew I had to stop trying to do so much on my own. In order for this event to be the massive success that I wanted it to be (and it was), I needed to ask for help.

For someone as stubborn as I am, this was not easy to do, but four hours of broken sleep every night was not going to cut it anymore. After shedding many tears over a phone call to my boyfriend, followed by a phone call to my mom and at least thirty minutes of complaining to my roommates on the floor of our suite, I decided to reach out to any and everyone that I knew for help. We needed volunteers? Text everyone you know and see if they are free. I couldn't be there to pick up supplies? Find someone that had a free space in their schedule to lend a helping hand. No time to get snacks to bring for the team? Mom to the rescue!

At the end of the day, I left the meet feeling exhausted, but more full of love and appreciation for my life than ever before. Sitting at lunch with my incredibly helpful and supportive family, my ride-or-die best friend of 11 years, and my extremely patient boyfriend, I felt such a radiant love in my life. All of the stress was worth it because it meant that I was loved, I was trusted, and I could handle it, even if I couldn't handle it on my own.

So instead of pushing my stress aside, I now focus on stress as a sign of a blessed life. I have a long laundry list of responsibilities in my roles as student, team captain, tutor, department student assistant, editor, girlfriend, best friend, roommate, sister, daughter...the list goes on because I cannot say no to anything. However, none of these responsibilities were given to me as a punishment. Quite the contrary: they were given to me because people trust me to get the job done well and God's trust that I can handle all of these stressors.

I refuse to ignore my stress any longer. I choose to embrace my stress because it proves that I lead a truly blessed life.