Revelation

Maybe this is obvious to everyone but me, but I realized something as I lay awake in bed (stressed as balls) last night. When I left PETA I assumed that my anxiety level would drop in direct proportion to my stress level. I also assumed that my stress level and my work load had a causational relationship. In other words, I assumed that my work load and the type of work I was doing caused my unmanageably high level of anxiety. Not so, as it turns out; the relationship was one of correlation, not causation.

Stress and anxiety are internal forces which are often only related to our environments incidentally. While environmental factors are often the catalyst of our anxiety/depression/stress/etc., the root cause has more to do with our subjective perceptions of self as we interact with our surroundings and live our lives. Those of us who feel compelled to perpetually strive for bigger and better things will always struggle with the anxiety caused by the subjects of our respective pursuits. The real bitch is that, even when we aren’t striving for anything other than relief, this bull shit cognitive-dissonance-like force moves in to replace the sloughed off stressors we’d managed to escape and we soon find other environmental/situational issues to catalyze the same old feelings. All the while we lose sight of the real problem and remain preoccupied with finding something external on which we can blame our inner conflict. Sounds dismal, huh? Well, maybe not…

The upshot is this: If we strive to become acquainted with the nature of our stress/anxiety/depression/etc. we will be increasingly less likely to allow our lives to be affected by it/them. If we begin to look at our respective situations with these omnipresent feelings in mind, we will make better choices. For example, I shouldn’t avoid heavy work loads out of the fear that I won’t be able to cope with the subsequent stress. The stress will be there anyway. When I find myself stressed out or anxious, I shouldn’t waste time and energy scouring my environment for stressors and nuisances. I should instead focus on doing what needs to be done to get where I want to go. Plus, when determining where it is that I want to go, it would be foolish to allow the misdiagnosis of my current environment to come into play. In other words, I shouldn’t run from a situation which appears to be making me anxious since the anxiety will surely follow.

My conclusion: I’m applying to law school, and I think Tessman should too.