Communication is the Key... to Literally Everything

At 5:27 this morning my alarm went off to wake up for work.  At 5:28 this morning my friend called me because she was having a panic attack.

As we talked her way out of it, we hit on all the hot topics of stressed out twentysomething year old's:  school, work, balancing social life with the workload and, most famously, careers and that whole what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life question that plagues us all.

Ah, that fateful Spring day last May...

Though I graduated almost a year ago, (holy shit!) the stress of impending graduation is all too vivid in my memory.  It's like a mental third degree burn; the pain may be gone, but the scarring remains behind as a reminder of it all.

I could feel Eris* hitting the wall I remembered running into so many times a few months before graduation.  It's horrifying.  The small comfort I offered her was that I used to do the same thing, twice a week for about five months before I graduated.  That's the bad news.  The good news is that while she's going to face some of the lowest lows, she's also going to reach some of the highest highs over the next few months.  It's the ultimate roller coaster ride.
This whole weekend had me thinking about the importance of communication and I felt my thoughts all kind of fall into place as I hung up with Eris.

I have always prided myself as a person who wears her emotions on her sleeve, but I've recently come to realize that that's not the case at all.  It's the momentary emotions, the flash of anger or annoyance, the extreme happiness or excitement, that I outwardly express; but it's the deeper, more permanent emotions, the ones that gnaw away at my consciousness, that I suppress.

I always told people that I wasn't prone to depression because I was just a happy person and if given the option between deep sadness and letting something go, I instinctively dropped the reins.

I do believe that is still the case, but I think my refusal to admit that I was prone to any kind of deep emotion crippled me in an unexpected way.

I turned inward with my problems, spiraling downward without ever truly realizing it.

My mom recently told me that one of the big differences she noticed between my older brother and myself was that he was always content with the hand he was dealt and I always wanted more.

Initially, I was offended. I took it to mean that Mike was happier in his life because he could be happy anywhere and that I was a spoiled brat who hated that I needed to pay my own bills and live at home. My mother's assurance that that was not the case at all only confirmed my beliefs.

But now that I've had more time to think about it, I've realized that while I may be less comfortable with my life than my always laid back, patient as hell brother, it's not because of money or security; it's because he knows exactly what he wants to do with his life and he's been doing it for years.  He's about to graduate as a musical education major, he's student teaching currently and he works at a preschool.  He wants to teach children and he is.

I have no idea what I want to do and therefore, I'm not doing it.

But that's not even the problem.

The problem is that I keep this to myself.

I keep it to myself because I know what people are going to say and for some reason, I'm not ready to hear it.


*Names have been changed.