Sometimes, existing feels like driving through the mud. Trying to do anything takes immense effort that I just don’t have the energy to put in. I used to feel ashamed of this, like I should always be able to give 100%. But thanks to my mom and maturity, I’ve learned that it’s okay.
It’s okay to not have energy. As hard as that is to accept, I find that you have to at one point or another. I do this by taking time to sit with myself and reflect on how I feel. I ask myself things like “What do you get out of forcing yourself to keep going?” and “What made you feel this way?” The second one really helps because it allows me to either change my thinking about something or reevaluate my process for doing something.
One example of this is just this week when math was really exhausting me. It was like problem after problem just kept piling up and taking my energy with it. This made me realize that I needed to reassess how I think about math because I’m going to have to do it for the rest of my life, so I might as well learn to like it. I ended up deciding to think of each problem as a chance to learn rather than a test. Each problem contains some kind of knowledge that I should know, and the only way to get it is to complete the problem correctly. Now, instead of feeling like each problem weighed one hundred pounds, they feel like feathers.
However, I will admit that this doesn’t always work. Sometimes things are just hard. But that’s when you couple that with something you enjoy. When my math homework feels especially hard, I’ll tell myself I get to write poetry after I finish. This surge of excitement gets me happy enough to finish my work. Plus, doing something I enjoy makes existing feel more like sliding through the mud than trying to drive.
Until next time,
Ella Greene
