Oh, The Joys of Life

Sometimes, I envy that headless chicken – you know the one, where someone who is beyond stressed says, “I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off!”

If only the craziness in my life were that calm.

Honestly speaking, and comparing to other people who I’m sure are far more stressed than I am, my life is pretty good, although stressful on my own levels of measure. I remember during my senior year in high school, all seniors were required to take Senior Health, where we learned all about the human body (learning reproduction for the 18th time, anyone?), healthy lifestyles, blah blah blah. Mostly stuff that we’d heard before. Although one day, we learned about the negative side effects that can occur with high amounts of stress.

“OK, everyone, today you’re going to take a test that evaluates your own levels of stress based on events that have happened in the last year. Then, after you’re through, we’ll compare scores among the class.”

Apparently, there are different categories or levels that you can fall under, based on your score, that tells you the likelihood of having a serious stress-related injury in the next year.

After taking the test, it was determined that I had one of the highest scores in the class, and that I had over a 75% chance of having a stress-related health risk in the next year. Of course, I wasn’t surprised by this news: that year, I was moving out-of-state with my parents after graduation, then getting ready to move to a new city and start college, my grandfather was terminally ill with colo-rectal cancer and we knew he was sliding downhill rather quickly, and I had at least 2 other close family members with serious health problems.

Needless to say, in regards to addressing and sending graduation announcements, cleaning out my house and packing said house, saying good-bye to high school friends and mentally preparing myself to make new ones in a new town, starting a new job in a new town where I had no friends and didn't know anyone outside my family and my dog, and then trying to adjust at a new school, in addition to the worry over my ill family members – yeah, its no wonder I had one of those high scores.

However, I knew that “this too shall pass,” and I wasn’t too worried. I thought that once I moved, started college, and my family problems died down, my stress level would return to normal, and I would return to my happy-go-lucky self, whose biggest worry was that I wouldn’t meet any cute boys at college and that my parents would turn my room into a home gym or something.

As you probably guessed it, that dream didn’t last long. By my second year of college where I had 6 midterms in one week, 3 times during the course of the semester, I was literally having panic attacks on the phone to my mother multiple times per month, who did her best to calm me down, and assure me that no, the world was not going to end if I didn’t get 100% on this test.

(Just for a bit of background info, I only got one B+ in high school, and that was my physics class. I graduated with a 3.95 GPA, which I was very proud of. However, it also gave me an unrealistic opinion as to my own IQ, which was challenged the minute I stepped foot on my college campus and realized exactly how many more people are smarter than me….by a LOOOONG shot.)

Over the past three and a half years since I’ve graduated from high school and taken that eye-opening stress test, I’ve gone back and found the same kind of stress test on the internet, and even took the same one during my Human Resource Management class. And as a matter of fact, my life is still overly stressful – at least according to those smart psychiatrists who make the tests in the first place.

So long story short (a lot of my posts end this way – sorry about that), I’ve gotten quite comfortable with the fact that I will probably always have a 80%+ chance of incurring a stress-related injury for the next year…for the rest of my life. It hasn’t happened in the last three and a half years since high school, but I’ll keep you updated if anything changes.

Maybe I should take up Yoga…although I’m sure that while you’re supposed to practice deep breathing and cleansing of the mind, I’ll be thinking about the one thing I simply cannot forget to pick up at Fred Meyer this week.