Anxieties into anger

The weather has been tough on my mood. I don’t want to say I get seasonal depression but during the winter months, I struggle to rekindle happiness and positivity when the nights are long and the days short. Walking back and forth from classes becomes tedious and even waking up to do something I’ve loved since middle school – running – has taken on an element of duty.

It’s the little things that bother me the most. Things that may not have irritated me in the past find their way into my cycle of grievances and I’ve been struggling to overlook them. When I forgot my umbrella in Commons, that annoyed me tremendously. When I did poorly on a history pop quiz, I became really upset. When I failed to make proper sense of redox reactions in chemistry, I also reacted poorly.  

These minor grievances have taken a toll on my mental state. I’ve rarely felt so pessimistic and morose for such this long a period of time. I feel sad constantly and waking up has never felt more difficult, particularly when I look out my window and see nothing but pitch blackness. When I ask myself what is causing my sadness, I can’t muster a single, coherent answer. Maybe this goes to suggest that there isn’t one single area of my life causing sadness, but rather the eclectic composition of all the elements formulating a type of pressure I have yet to learn how to handle maturely.

Talking my through my feelings has historically proven successful in helping me cope with problems. I was talking with my longtime friend at school who shares similar responses to the dark New England winters, and she helped me realize my tendency to turn my anxieties into waves of anger.  I seem to get angry at things that I feel vulnerable about or things I’m unconfident about. I think I need to adopt a mechanism for recognizing things that make me uncomfortable and/or vulnerable so that I don’t confuse it for anger. 

For example, when a sale with my business club took some unexpected avenues, it induced great amounts of stress when the faculty member I was working with began texting me to express the exigency of the situation. Or when chemistry an entire chapter of chemistry failed to make sense in my mind. I was also putting together a last-minute English project with another classmate for extra credit, which we both finished last night believing had done a horrendous job.  These are the instances my friend helped me identify that have caused me stress that has transformed into self-anger. I have to avoid expecting perfection in everything I do. 

I’m striving to move past my sadness. I read like a book, so others have noticed my drop in vivacity this past term. A part of me selfishly wants to grip onto the sadness as an excuse, but it’s driving me in a direction in which I’m not exactly proud. But sometimes there are instances where one cannot get out of the circle of despair. But I’m trying. I really am.