Stressing My Life Away

Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is one big deadline that I’ll never accomplish. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always had something I was working towards and deadlines I had to fulfill if I wanted to reach my goal. Even when I finally accomplish a goal and meet a deadline, I don’t feel satisfied because I know I’ll have another deadline knocking at my door in a day or two.

School has always felt like a an enormous deadline that hangs over my head and makes me feel anxious and stressed out on a daily basis. There’s homework I have to do every night and projects I have to turn in on time. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never have a day where I can just sit at home and relax without worrying about a school deadline looming in the future. Even in the summer I get anxious when I think about all I have to do to prepare for the upcoming school year.

Now that I’m a sophomore, more people are starting to ask me about what I want to do in the future. My parents want to know what college I want to attend, what I want to study, and what kind of job I want but honestly at this point in my life, I have no idea what I want to do in the future. How can I know what I want to do after college when I don’t even know what I want to do this weekend? Even now as I write this I can already feel the pressure of college application deadlines and I haven’t even finished the first quarter of my sophomore year of high school. I’ve already started stressing out about the ACT; my goal is to get a better score than my brother which will be a hard goal to accomplish. I feel like my parents expect so much of me which adds even more pressure, but the person who adds the most pressure to my life is myself. I never feel satisfied with anything until it is perfect which makes it that much harder to meet deadlines because I want to spend so much time on one project in order to perfect it.

I’m trying to teach myself that the important thing in life isn’t that I meet all the deadlines in my life, but that I put one hundred percent effort into the deadlines I do accomplish. Even if something isn’t perfect I should still feel satisfied because I worked hard and created something on my own, which is pretty impressive in itself. If I embrace my stress instead and learn to control it instead of letting it consume me, maybe the the world won’t feel as daunting. Maybe I’ll start seeing the world as an opportunity for growth instead of a deadline for perfection.