I have spent so much time making mountains out of mole hills, never questioning if the issue was as serious as I was making it, as urgent as I was making it.  Was it as serious as other people were making it seem?  Where did this urgency really come from?  Nothing HAS to happen right now, and I’ve convinced myself that it needs to be RIGHT NOW—IMMEDIATELY.  This life can be so simple.  Hold accountability for ourselves and stop worrying about participation trophy culture, the culture where everyone’s opinion is reality because we all have a platform and think that is the way to have our voices heard.  90% of this pressure I feel, whether or not it has an external stimulus, is in how I’m responding to this crap.  Sure, we can justify the reasons for staying in situations that don’t quite fit, that rub us the wrong way, that aren’t fulfilling, that don’t spark any joy but at the end of the day, what we tolerate is what we allow in our lives. If we look at everything as a crisis, like a volcano about to explode, everything feels like it’s going to explode.  We don’t need to put that kind of pressure on ourselves.  We don’t need to allow that type of pressure in our lives either. 

I grew up around constant pressure.  The constant feeling that we had to be doing, doing, doing all the time.  That the only way to make something happen was through sheer will and force—and to do it until it was finished.  To do it right the first time.  There was also the pressure to BE right, to be the right person, the person people wanted you to be all the time.  All of these behaviors are performative and I was taught that is the norm.  We jump to what other people want us to do, we do what other people ask of us—and if there’s time left for what we want to do then we can focus on that.  It was what I was born into.  My siblings had a different kind of pressure than my parents, my parents a different kind of pressure than my grandparents, pressure from the family as a whole, pressure from school.  I believed I had to be everything everyone wanted/needed all the time.  That was my job.  That was what life was about—being what other people needed, nothing about forming who I was.  And everything became a huge deal.  The smallest insults were as painful and as the biggest and treated as such.  Then there was the whole desire to be taken seriously by my siblings so my problems had to be as pressing as theirs…at least in my mind.  I wanted to be taken seriously too, after all.  That became the norm, the habit and I really never stopped to ask if that was something I needed to keep doing, if what I was doing served the bigger picture—was I getting the results I really wanted feeling that way all the time?

Many, many years later, now I have the wherewithal to see my role in all this.  I see the choices I made and the choices I can still make to change these feelings.  I see that this pressure ultimately came from me.  I see the circumstances I put myself in, all the things I said yes to that should have been a no, and the things I said no to that should have been a yes (to make things a little easier).  And the common factor in all of it was me.  It was the choices I made, the things I decided to take on in my life.  Why was I choosing to put so much pressure on myself if it wasn’t serving anything or bringing the desired results anyway?  All of this stems from how we view it.  There are people who seem to take on infinite tasks and do it with ease.  There are those who crumble at the smallest amount of pressure.  There are those who pile on and cry victim.  There are those who just want to make everyone happy.  In all of those scenarios, we are STILL the common denominator.  That is all our choice.  We show those around us, the world, the universe what we are willing to accept by what we allow in our lives.  By what we choose to continue.  We don’t need to suffer if something is changeable.  For some people that suffering is where they feel the most normal and it’s uncomfortable to feel good.  But if we are all seeking that type of satisfaction and joy in our lives, then we have to ask what brings joy and what we are doing to allow it.  If the pressure doesn’t serve, it needs to change.  Release some of the power from the volcano we created before it explodes on its own.