4\/4\/19<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I realized I was stressed today. I come to these moments of stress a lot, these moments of finding out a fear and anxiety that I have been holding onto for a long while but having no name for. During college, I frequently felt sick and stressed. A year before graduation, it came to a head when I looked over at the heavy machinery in my place of employ and thought:<\/p>\n
I could just kill myself. <\/em><\/p>\n I was scared and alarmed by the thought. It had been years since I was last suicidal, and realizing my stress was getting bad enough to flare my depression up in such a harmful way was a wake-up call. I made it through the semester and relied on my friends and family to help keep me stable. And then summer came, and I was proud that I survived. I worked on my health and entered my last year as a college student in good spirits. I wasn\u2019t suicidal the entire semester. I considered this a win. It wasn\u2019t until I graduated that I realized just how poor my health had gotten. I would be relaxing in my house, a place of immense comfort and joy for me, and be hit over the head with stress. My stomach would churn, my heart would race, and I would find myself panicking about life, and what came next, even though I had a job that paid more than living-wage, a house that was warm, and friends and family that loved me. I had a plan. I was working on that plan. And stepping back, it appeared to me at the time that I had nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n And yet today, while having lunch, I found myself sick to my stomach once again. This has been happening a lot lately. After a horrible bout of stomach sickness that left me bedridden for several days, I determined some of my issues were stress-related. Getting too worked up caused my stomach to reject anything and everything I ate. I went hungry. I lost ten pounds. Considering I\u2019ve generally struggled keeping myself at a healthy weight, this loss put me back at the weight I was in my early high school days. This was clearly a concern. Something else had to be going on. A something else probably is. But the entire situation has made me pause and consider myself.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always struggled with depression. After rearing its ugly head in high school after horrendous 7th<\/sup> and 8th<\/sup> grade years, it has haunted me throughout my life. I went to a dark place for several years, played my own suicide, and self-harmed to keep from throwing myself off a bridge. I was scared of my own mind and what I might do if I lost control. But eventually, by the grace of God, I was able to get better through hard work and amazing friends and family. There is no cure, but there is a way to manage it, and I was able to do just that. When college came around, I did well. I was confident, and the course material was nothing I couldn\u2019t handle. As I set out into university life with the determination to pay my own way without loans, I knew it would be stressful at times, but I also knew I would be able to do it. I could succeed at this task. And I did. A fact I am incredibly proud of. But it didn\u2019t come without drawbacks.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve realized my mental health has taken a few steps back without my recognition. It doesn\u2019t present itself in the way it used to, in the way I\u2019ve prepared for. Instead, I am unaware of its existence, even being confident it does not exist, until I realize my heart has been pounding faster than it should and I force myself to take calming breaths.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What is it? <\/em>I\u2019ll inquire to myself. What\u2019s wrong? What\u2019s the problem? <\/em><\/p>\n I often find that the problem doesn\u2019t lie within work, or even within life. But in the expectation of it, I suppose. The idea that I need to be successful, the idea that I need to be victorious. And it\u2019s not directed at anything but my writing. I place such an emphasis on my creative work due to the fact that it is everything that I am\u2014or, at least, what I believe makes up my whole person. I\u2019m so insistent that this endeavor be successful, that I\u2019ve mistakenly placed a greater stress upon my shoulders than I\u2019ve ever acknowledged. This is what I love. These words upon the page, the flowing narrative, the characters interacting. This is what I live for, what has countless times before saved my life. And yet, it seems, I\u2019m letting it hurt me. Writing is one of the only times that I feel truly at peace and truly fulfilled. It is what I love, it is what I long to do for a full-time job.<\/p>\n And yet, at this rate, my stress will kill me before I even see that through.<\/p>\n I have a hard time calling myself anything other than a \u2018decent-enough\u2019 writer. I find that I could improve in a lot of areas. But my friends have taken to insisting that no, I\u2019m a good <\/em>writer, and I\u2019d better only call myself that. I\u2019m thankful for this. And I\u2019m learning.<\/p>\n Doing what you love for a living is hard. I\u2019ve not even made it there yet, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m discovering. But I refuse to let myself get in the way of success and healthy living. I refuse to let stress and depression cripple me into bedridden sickness. I will succeed, but I will do it at my own pace. I will breathe. I will remember that everything takes time, and everyone\u2019s road is different. I will work on not comparing myself to other indie writers. I will breathe.<\/p>\n And I will breathe.<\/p>\n And I will breathe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 4\/4\/19 I realized I was stressed today. I come to these moments of stress a lot, these moments of finding out a fear and anxiety that I have been holding onto for a long while but having no name for. During college, I frequently felt sick and stressed. A…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[1],"tags":[473,472,157,12,238,88,97],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27tjX-mo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1393,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winter-publishing.com\/welcome-to-winter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}