The very last blog post [WARNING: EXTREMELY long, NOT fun to read.]

This post is going to be very long and talks about a lot of really ugly feelings related to stress. Suffice it to say, I haven’t really been coping well, despite any persona I may adopt at school.

I wanted to take a sec to talk about my blog before class is over. [edit after I have finished writing this: this essay is roughly 1400 words long and actually has nothing to do with my blog. At all. It gets dark after a while.]

My blog has been a little impersonal. I’ve been writing about a lot of general topics and not too much of my own experiences. The topics are of interest to me (see: bugs, chocolate) but I didn’t exactly open up completely about my life. There are two posts so far that deal with stories about me (the first and third posts). The other ones have been either weird publicity stunts (“some words that are short”) or essays that stick to “here’s some cool information; I hope you like it”.

Part of the reason is that I haven’t been doing too well lately. A lot of people write about stress here, and I applaud that they feel comfortable talking about their experiences with college, grades, lack of sleep, and all the other stressors in the average Uni lifestyle. In the past few weeks, sometimes I’d toss around the idea of writing about how I’d been feeling, but it was hard for me to talk about my emotions. 

 Up until the end of sophomore year, Uni had been hard in the sense of “challenging”. Each class was difficult, yet fun, and it was good to have a community of fellow nerds to talk with. I liked the work. Tests were hard, but I embraced them rather than dreading them. I managed to do well in all my classes and I felt happy at school.

The first semester of Junior year hasn’t been like that at all. Part of the problem is that it’s suddenly become a lot more difficult for me to understand things and get good grades. Physics is hard, and Calc is really fun, but also hard. In Calc especially, all the subject matter seems cool but is going by just a little too quickly for me to really understand. Added to that, there’s the fact that I’m considering a Math major, and a B or C in Calculus doesn’t really make me look like some brilliant mathematician that a university is going to want.

Field Bio has been fun, as has Latin (there’s something nice about the nearly perfectly regular grammar of the language, and it’s mirrored well in the easy-to-grasp structure of the course). I’ve liked History to a surprising degree, and Nonfic has had a lot of big assignments that I procrastinate, but I’ve enjoyed it all the same. 

However, the stress of having to prepare for all of my classes’ deadlines, plus extracurriculars, plus “I’m not doing enough extracurriculars to get into X school”, plus “I need to do college visits”, plus “I can’t afford to not get an A in everything AAAAAAAH” has changed the way Uni feels. It no longer feels “challenging”. It feels like it’s breaking me. 

The worst part of this semester so far has been midseason of swimming. The team is really supportive, the coaches are both amazing, and the dynamic between all of us has been great. So why was I stressed out? What caused me to stress so much was a destructive idea that I carried with me through the season. I want to swim well, and currently I swim… mediocrely? Compared to non-swimmers and casual swimmers, I’m excellent at swimming. That’s because I know good technique and I’m reasonably in shape for swimming. But compared to the average high-school Sectionals swimmer in my event, I’m in the worse half. 

I got very frustrated this season because I was in a plateau. My time hadn’t improved from the middle of last season. It had gotten slower. Even though I was swimming every day in practice, even though I made faster times in sets, my time was getting slower. 

At the same time, I didn’t feel good after practice any more. I didn’t feel the happy post-exercise endorphins because I was too busy focusing on the little tiny failures I had made: I could have swum that 200 a little faster. I didn’t get the time I wanted in the 50 sprint at the end. Because I felt so much stress, I didn’t feel the tiredness associated with exercise. I felt tired and sore all the time, but I didn’t feel like I was working hard. At the same time, the reality of the workload waiting for me the minute I got home sank in, making me regret the past and worry about the future. None of this thinking was at all encouraged by the coaches or teammates. Our coach repeatedly discouraged us from these thoughts. But I couldn’t let go.

I began to feel emotionless at school. Instead of thinking and worrying about work, I let the feeling settle to a weight in my gut, along with all my other emotions. Then I’d get to practice, or home, and they’d all hit me at once – a day of stresses condensed into an instant. It got to the point where I couldn’t mentally cope with hard sets at practice, and I’d have to truncate them or remove the time pressure. It got to the point where I would feel panic and fear the moment the set was announced. I wasn’t even doing badly. I was just so afraid of failure in all its forms that I wouldn’t take the risks necessary to fail.

After races I focused too much (and despite my coach telling me not to) about my time, as opposed to technique. My limbs never felt quite right in the water and I thought it was some impending sign of doom, like I was forgetting to ride a bicycle. I think now that it was just stress and worry. Still, even as Sectionals approached and taper should have been kicking in, it felt like my limbs were infused with lead.

At Sectionals I set a personal record by 4 seconds. I should have been very happy – it was the first time I had moved the needle in a year and a half. But I was oddly hypocritical. I had assumed that my “mindset” was somehow responsible for all my failures: “I didn’t try hard enough.” “I should have pushed through the pain more.” “I need to keep a steadier pace instead of slowing down when I tire.” But in this race, I succeeded. Instead of happiness, my mind was full of: “That was probably just the fastskin.” “Really, my goal was to drop ten seconds.” “I didn’t taper well enough to drop ten seconds.” “My time still wasn’t that great.” These thoughts made it hard to feel satisfied that I had done well. And because I had such a bad mental experience with swim, I didn’t miss the season much. What I did feel was relief. That worried me.

After the swim season ended, I got a lot more free time. This helped my mood a lot. I went from crying at least once a week to only crying maybe twice a month, a definite improvement! Progress! I can enjoy things more. The pit in my stomach where my emotions went to die seems to have closed for the season.

But this is only a temporary Band-Aid. I really enjoyed swimming from when I learned until two weeks into this season, and I want to enjoy it again. I’m joining a non-Uni-affiliated team this spring and I want to focus on being happy, and accepting myself. I put myself under such pressure to succeed this season that I fell apart. I don’t want that to happen again.

The scariest thing to happen to me this year hasn’t been a bad meet, or a bad grade (though Calc comes close). It was the Junior/Senior Health Seminar on Self-Compassion. Specifically, the moment when the ex-Uni XC runner now struggling with depression described how she felt about running in her senior year, the times when she felt a sudden panic, like she couldn’t continue, and a tightness in her chest. And how soon she felt the same tightness even when she wasn't running. And I thought, “this sounds like me.”

It's way late and this post is 34 minutes overdue and I have no idea why I wrote it because now I feel sad and like it's a bit too much information, but it's too late to change the topic. Readers, this is what you're gonna get.