Monday morning, I woke up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Typically, I wake up. I shower. I get ready. I go have breakfast with my friends. Typically, I’m okay. I have it under control. Which I think is something we all feel we need to do. Especially as woman, who are often called over emotional, hysterical. We need to keep ourselves in check and not show the world what we’re feeling. I tend to push that to a limit. I work myself until I can’t work and then wonder why I have weeks like the one I just had.
I still got everything done. I managed to get out of bed, even if I did it at the last possible second. I also know I wasn’t the best me I could have been. I was tired, I was run down, and most of all my head was all over the place. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t sleep. It didn’t help that I force myself into this mentality in which anyone seeing me even slightly tired is the end of the world for me. I set these unrealistic expectations for myself and beat myself over it when I don’t meet them.
This week was hard to get through. At one point I got to my room. Curled up in the bathtub, because my roommate was in the room and the last thing I wanted was for her to see me break down. Which is part of the problem. We are human, we break down, we have off days. They’re just not unacceptable to be on display. It’s all behind closes doors. It just adds more pressure on ourselves. We work twice as hard to make sure we look like were always on top of our shit instead of just focusing on actually being on top of our shit. All that energy to keep up appearances could go into what we’re working on. I was so busy trying to be okay that I stopped paying as much attention to everything else around me. I definitely avoided my friends. I did not need them seeing me like that. Again, that’s a problem. We all need to let our guards down every once in a while. It’s important to have people in your life that you can trust.
My tips, on getting through it, an old cliché and one that annoys even me. Just do it. Even when your bones feel too heavy to lift. When the very idea of standing makes you want to cry. Find something and use it to pull you up. Maybe it’s the idea of disappointing you friend, your mom, your brother, maybe it’s fear of disappointing yourself.
Of course, it’s also important to take days to yourself. Something, I am not very good at. It’s important though. So, get through the week, get what you need to get done, finished up. Then set a day, or at least half of one, to seat back and breath. I understand that as woman we need to work ten times harder, as a woman of color, all that more so. We also need to take care of ourselves. Anxiety is a hard thing to live with, it makes breathing hard, but it’s not an excuse to not get things done or not take care of ourselves.
We have so much going on in our everyday lives. We need to get up for classes, for work, for social gatherings. It can all take its toll on us. This week it was hard to get out of bed. It was hard to sit at the table talking with my friends. Small things become mountains. We don’t let those mountains top us though. That’s the whole point at the end of the day. We may be tired, and sad, and our heads may be screaming but we keep going. We keep climbing.
I know that it’s hard first hand, but I believe that things get better. Things always get better. And that’s what I held on to this week and will keep holding on to. Things get better. We keep moving forward.