Raise your hand if you’re guilty of already suffering a mental breakdown during this school year. I know I can’t be the only one.
It’s incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed and lose your cool when not every aspect of your life is falling perfectly into place. It’s especially easy for this to happen if, like me, you suffer from mild anxiety and think that little things are the end of the world. Relax. History has shown that they aren’t.
Classes are in full swing and the first round of midterms is upon us. We all know what this means: late nights in Club Hes, frequent Starbucks runs, and more than a few Skinny Pop binge sessions. My roommate’s and my favorite coping mechanism for a long night of reading and Marketing homework is to create absurd Spotify playlists filled with Celtic music and instrumental nature sounds (you wouldn’t believe how many different ecosystems have Spotify playlists). Even though it can feel a little cult-like when we’re sitting on our futon and we’re suddenly surrounded by Gaelic chanting, the point is that we’ve found a way to keep ourselves sane in the midst of a turbulent academic stint.
Let’s look at life from another angle: the social aspect. Many girls are notoriously catty, and not even the strongest friend groups are completely immune to troubles. Miscommunications occur, people take sides, and feelings get hurt.
In times like this it’s important to remember what helped you forge such a close bond of friendship with these people in the first place. It takes a lot of understanding and compassion to realize that your best friend’s passive-aggressive remark at the DH is more likely than not a manifestation of stress in her own life and not a legitimate attack on you.
It’s helpful for me to remember something my high school best friend’s mom always told us: when you’re in the midst of a conflict and harsh words have been exchanged, you have to decide whether it’s more important to you to be right or to save your relationship. This puts a lot of conflicts into perspective for me.
There are many things that could go wrong other than academics and girl fights. For instance, I take it as a personal affront when NDH serves bacon instead of sausage during brunch (because bacon = ew). You might cut yourself shaving and have to sport a dorky Band-Aid to class. You could drop your tray in SDH and have a room full of strangers clap for you. You may forget to bring a towel to the campus beach when you go skinny dipping and have to wait in the T-Bell line dripping wet for an interminable amount of time (if you’re into that kind of thing…). You could get into a stupid fight with your boyfriend about something that isn’t the fault of either of you–you were just looking to pick a fight. All of these things could even happen on the same day!
Maintaining perspective is arguably the most important skill to develop during your college years. If these are the biggest problems we have to deal with in college, then we can count ourselves pretty lucky. As grown-up as we like to think we are, we’re all still very young and vulnerable and being at Notre Dame is like living in a very cushioned world. It may be a big, scary world out there, but for right now it would benefit us all to remember this:
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