College is a stressful time. On my better days, I try to look at it as a forge, a crucible for creating great works out of mere metal. However, life makes it become less about ideals and vision many times. Stress, especially academic stress can wash over you like a fog on a hazy and hot day, unexpected and sometimes overwhelming. I am no stranger to it. There are a variety of stressors that come with academic life. Time management, hard classes, extremely variable workload are some of many for me. They roll in like this flash fog, sudden and unexpected. I feel like it is an adjustment period to be ready to deal with them, especially with neurodivergency. ADD (my form of neurodivergency) is a major stressor for me as I feel like it takes me much longer on certain things, especially when I find them rather dull. It almost feels like I become cyclic and erratically inefficient, opening new browser tabs, having to get up to walk around to read another quarter to half of a paragraph, it feels truly debilitating sometimes.
College is a stressful time. On my better days, I try to look at it as a forge, a crucible for creating great works out of mere metal. However, life makes it become less about ideals and vision many times. Stress, especially academic stress can wash over you like a fog on a hazy and hot day, unexpected and sometimes overwhelming. I am no stranger to it. There are a variety of stressors that come with academic life. Time management, hard classes, extremely variable workload are some of many for me. They roll in like this flash fog, sudden and unexpected. I feel like it is an adjustment period to be ready to deal with them, especially with neurodivergency. ADD (my form of neurodivergency) is a major stressor for me as I feel like it takes me much longer on certain things, especially when I find them rather dull. It almost feels like I become cyclic and erratically inefficient, opening new browser tabs, having to get up to walk around to read another quarter to half of a paragraph, it feels truly debilitating sometimes.
Truly, I do wish it were easier, but I feel like life has to be hard before it gets easy…before it gets better. Do I think this all the time? Absolutely not. But I think upon review and better hindsight this proves to be partially true. I have witnessed my personal evolution and growth over the years and so have others. I would not be the person I am today without the wealth of experiences and downfalls which both propel my step and drag at my feet. It is just incredibly hard sometimes. Some days it feels damn near impossible to keep going. It feels like some days I get to the lowest point I have been at in my life, drowning at the bottom of the ocean, yet when I get there, I feel that there is something or someone to pull me up and back into the race of becoming the person I want to be. While the path forward can be unclear, and life can really drag you down to its’ murky depths, I can speak from experience when I say that the best choice is pushing forward with your goals. Self-fulfillment and being content with your life in my opinion has and will remain the foundation for having a life well lived.