Survival Guide: How to Life

I know I have not written anything for a noticeable amount of time but I had my reasons and I hope you did not judge me too much for it. I have been thinking about an issue for a while and since I feel like I found a solution for it I thought I would share. This is basically a story about me finding a power to rationalize and prioritize some of the things that I was doing in my life that were causing me anxiety and bunch of other issues. Without further adieu, let’s begin. 

Us, students, are pretty magnificent. We are expected to be adults, but at the same time we are not allowed to do many things because we are financially or physically depended on our par
ents or just people who have higher authority. And our strive for this power can be immense sometimes, at a point when we do so many things together to make ourselves feel important that we just end up damaging ourselves greatly. At the end of the day we are just sitting somewhere in the corner, like an empty shell filled with anxiety and hatred. And trust me I know this because this was me last semester.

I started of second year of my university career very motivated. I wanted to grow as a person, fight my weaknesses and get over some of the insecurities by stepping into some of the things that made me feel uncomfortable. Because that was the best way I knew how to do it. I wanted to impress people, feel important. So I just ended up doing probably 5 or 6 things at once that were equally time-consuming and required a lot of physical and mental energy from me. In the beginning  it was all great, running from one meeting to another, attending 5 events a week, leaving some of them halfway through to get to another one, basically having no weekends because they always ended up being booked…sounds chaotic, right? Well, it was. And I thought I was happy. All the people around me seemed impressed, I got compliments over my achievements. But then I started wondering, is this what I truly wanted? Because man I was exhausted! I constantly felt sick, I got dark circles under my eyes, my body felt like it was shutting down and overall feeling was not as satisfying as I thought it would be. Moreover, it is physically impossible to do so many equally important things and be equally productive in all of them. We are only humans.

I started to look at things differently after a time management meeting we had about a couple of months ago. There a speaker talked about her own example of struggling with time management in her life before and what kind  of struggles she was going through at that time. And it was like a slap in the face for me. I needed to hear this from another person, definitely. Doing exhausting amount of things to make yourself important does not make you important! It makes you look like a person who is not efficient in anything, because your supervisor of that one thing does not care that you are tired because you did 10 things before getting to that meeting.

I used winter break to kind of think through everything and decide what I wanted to do with my life. It is a great idea to write down all the tasks you are dealing with, list them with the level of importance to you and cross out couple of them. This will help you get rid of some of the stress in your life and also concentrate on things that matter to you better. Yes, it is hard, but it is for the greater good. I ended up leaving 3 out of 6 tasks in my life and it did feel irresponsible to give up some of them, although it was not irresponsible at all, but it gave me a lot of mental and physical freedom. Now I’m just left with some things that I love doing and I am efficient enough in them to truly feel important.

What I was trying to say is, don’t exhaust yourself with tasks that you can not withheld. We are students, we deal with things that we simply didn’t have to face before and many things add up to one huge ball of stress that occasionally hits us in the face. Therefore better keep healthy, concentrate on things that you enjoy and try to impress yourself before you impress others.

You’ve got this, bae!

Veko.