On Wednesday, December 14th, at 3:36 am exactly, I turned in my last essay as a college student.
12 hours later, I moved out of my college apartment, and said goodbye to my college roommates who I have been living with for three years at this point.
A week ago, at around 12am, I also submitted my law school applications. Applications that I have been working on for about a year and a half at this point; I took the LSAT 3 times and spent countless hours writing and rewriting essays trying to articulate to schools why they should consider me.
I did this all while starting a new job as a hiring manager at a non-profit that was going through a hiring wave.
Needless to say, these past couple of weeks (or more like months) have been a whirlwind of…everything. It was almost like life was on hyperdrive; as soon as I finished something stressful, there would be a new stressor to take it place immediately.
And, I hated it. I hated how I constantly felt behind and I hated how I never felt like I could give 100 percent in anything I was doing.
I also hated how things that I thought were supposed to be stress relieving, such as exercising, meditating, skincare, and even spending time with friends that I loved, became stressors too. Though I loved doing them, I kept thinking about how these were all distractions from the main tasks that I needed to complete: finishing college, being a good employee, and applying to law schools. The stress got me so bad that I cut out a lot of my good habits entirely, because I just felt so overwhelmed.
Moreover, it made me mad that even when I would talk to people, these three tasks were constantly the topic of my conversation. I felt like I couldn’t even be the person people wanted to talk to. The only thing on my mind was the stresses of life and nothing more. And I hated how I just wasn’t able to take the “healthy” advice I was given from others and I could not really improve my situation in any way.
Strangely enough though, a certain TikTok trend ended up changing my perspective on this situation. The trend is simply people talking about all the things that they COULD NOT accomplish in 2023: goals such as trying to lose weight or quit drinking or get therapy or something like that. Then, in the last slide, it ends with a simple, “but at least I made it to the end of the year and I am grateful for that.”
And that’s when I realized that it’s ok not to be ok. Sometimes in life, we go through things that are simply tough, and even with all the self-care advice and resources in the world, we still end up feeling crummy and sad.
And that’s why, reader, I want you to know that though advice like “take care of yourself,” and “treat yourself” are good things to follow, I just want you to know that there’s something else you should think about too. Dear Reader, no matter what, please remember to be kind to yourself. Life is already hard. There are already so many things to deal with. The last you really need is you being your worst enemy; instead I recommend you to be your own friend when things get hard.