I (don’t) Fall Apart

National Blog Posting Month – January 2014 – Pressure

Prompt – Do you think you handle pressure well, or do you usually fall apart?

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Pressure, also known as stress, is something that plagues life in the United States. We seem to revel in it as a nation. People even brag about how busy they are and how much they accomplish.

Of course, these same people fail to mention how miserable they felt while doing all that stuff. Nor do they mention how miserable everyone around them was at the same time.

Frankly, most people don’t handle pressure well. They think they do. They say yes to everything. Then wind up stressed out, bitter, and angry, and wonder why.

I’m no better than anyone else at getting overly busy. I put a ton of pressure on me to accomplish a zillion things. I’ve had meltdowns. I’ve been bitter.

Yet, I’m lucky. The one source of pressure that most people have – their jobs – is not that stressful for me. I’m not saying that life running a lab and teaching classes at a university is stress-free. What I’m saying is that I’m fortunate because I actually really enjoy my job (most of the time anyway). The pressures that come along are acceptable to me because they’re part of the whole – which is a career that I enjoy.

I can’t imagine being in a job that I hated, and having tons of pressure put on me daily to perform well at that job. This is most of our lives we’re talking about. With my job, I’ll take the bad days, because they’re few.

Because I actually like my career, and because that all the ‘extracurricular’ things that I pressure myself to do are also things I thoroughly enjoy doing, I feel as if I take the pressure pretty well.

Well I think I do, anyway. Maybe I’m not the right person to ask…