AFGOs

Most mornings recently I’ve woken up with a jolt of uneasiness. When combined with coffee, as it always is, I end up racing through my morning while thinking vaguely of hummingbirds. I’ve always found that stress that is within my control feels largely manageable. I simply morph myself into a stress-busting machine and annihilate the circumstance that has presented itself as a threat to my peace. If I’m concerned about an exam, I stay up late a few nights until I feel like I have a handle on the material. Dirty house, I clean it. Argument with husband, I sit down and sort it out ASAP. I trained myself to approach stress this way from a young age. I wouldn’t let myself rest or enjoy much of anything until that nagging feeling in my psyche had been quelled by quick, decisive action. These behaviors work well when you’re very young or your problems rest mainly within your control. Usually, since I was lucky enough to live in a privileged and loving household, there wasn’t much that obsessive studying or a thoughtful conversation couldn’t fix.

Obviously stress that is outside of our control cannot be excised from our lives quite as efficiently. For me, attempting to finish graduate school has felt as out of my control and unpredictable as something like predicting the surf. In order to know which beach I should go to on what weekend, I’d need knowledge concerning the sea floor topography, rainfall, tides, currents, winds, and many other, unknowable variables. Finishing graduate school feels as if it involves an equally complex combination of events that is similarly enigmatic and outside of my control. As a consequence, I’m left feeling saturated with a sub-threshold level of stress that is always in danger of meeting another semi-challenging event (messy kitchen, anyone??) and becoming SO NOT SUB-THRESHOLD anymore.

Simultaneously, in the words of Glennon Doyle Melton, I know that every challenge we encounter is an AFGO [another freaking growth opportunity]. I also know that we are made by what could break us. I believe that learning to find peace in the face of discomfort is one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and those around us. Knowing these things definitely doesn’t make the process any easier, but it does sometimes provide a little comfort and direction. Writing is undoubtedly my self-prescribed form of therapy, so thank you for taking the time to read about my experiences. I’d love to hear how you all stay sane in the face of stress!

–A

Disclaimer/Side note: Looking back, I fully recognize how fortunate I was that my biggest problem growing up was a bad grade. I was never hungry, unloved, or neglected. As I work through and explore my experiences with my own daily struggles, I do so with a baseline gratitude for my life and an understanding that true hardship is nothing I have ever experienced. Sometimes it’s hard for me to write about my own struggles when there is such pain in the world. However, compassion begins within, and what we don’t have we can’t give away. I choose to love and honor my own path in hope that it will make me more empathetic and compassionate towards the difficulties of others.