Real Talk, I'm Stressed.
There. Now you know.
I know it seems I'm always happy and care-free on Instagram and Instagram stories, but truth of the matter is that I'm stressed out of my mind. Let it be clear, this is all good stress. I'm financially stable(ish), I have a job, I'm in college, I have an apartment with my friends, I can afford to buy groceries and keep my utilities current and can even afford to buy a new sweater every now and then. I live in a happy family; I have best friends a girl could ever hope for and I have all of you. I'm not complaining. I wouldn't trade my life. It's a good life. But I'm stressed out with life and I think it's time I stop pretending to be perfect just for the sake of saving face in front of you.
Instagram is saturated. Between the private, personal, public, and mass publicized accounts on the platform it's easy to get caught in the motions of trying to look the less stressed and better dressed than others. I'm a part of the issue, I'm not above that and am not saying I'm exempt from the "Instagram bubble" we keep reading about. I also contribute to it by wanting to look through a window into the lives of our favorite bloggers. You like to look into mine and I like to see into Kate Padgitt's and Julia Engel's and the cycle goes on. This cycle isn't bad, I'm grateful for it. Without it, you wouldn't be here reading and I probably would have given up on writing, but you have to take these profiles with a grain of salt and understand that what you're seeing is true, but not entirely representative of life as a whole. Today I just wanted to say that I'm stressed and that's okay. I want to share a slice of my "behind the blog" life with you here today because it oftentimes slips through the cracks of daily blogs, posed Instagram pictures and 15 second stories.
I get questions all the time from bloggers starting out asking how I keep up a full-time blog when taking a full college schedule and adding another job on top of it. Readers always want to know "how I make it look so easy". Truth of the matter, I never never even thought about it until my friends at JMU would come up to me and say "I don't know how you do it, you literally have three jobs". All I knew was in a day it all got done.
Freshman year was relatively simple classes with the absence of a part time job, so it was like a breeze getting everything done before dinnertime. Once sophomore year started I added a part time job, but I was starting my major and most of the classes weren't too challenging. I also was much less involved on campus than I am right now which greatly helped in lightening my workload. Now, with a part time job, all of my major classes and heavy involvement on campus, and then working on Daily Dose of Prep and Markley Prescott on top of that, I feel like I'm drowning a little bit. The difficult thing is, everything on my plate has to stay on my plate. I can only shirk my responsibilities so much.
The point of this post isn't to complain. Like I mentioned before, everything that's stressing me out is good stress. It's necessary to happen. The reason I'm sharing is to let you know that I'm a human too. Most of my stress stems from the balance of a "healthy" college lifestyle. I am choosing between social life, school, and sleep and truthfully the easiest sacrifice is sleep. I'm choosing for forgo a healthy sleep schedule, so I can get everything done in a day. Seriously, I'm averaging 4 hours of sleep for the past 3 weeks.
When it comes to the blog, I normally don't get to writing posts until 11:00pm when they're supposed to go live at midnight. Look at today for example. I'm sitting in my Geography lecture writing this blog post so everything can get done. I know you're thinking "but nobody's forcing you to blog". I know and I guess this brings me to my overarching point. Even though I'm stressed to the max, using class time to write posts and sleep hours to finish school work, and staying up until 2:30 am every night, it all gets done because I love what I'm doing. I love my major enough to take the extra hours and make sure papers and projects are near perfect. I use a portion of my day to write about clothes and fashion and it never feels like a job. I enjoy giving tours and being in a sorority so I take the time to show my school to applicants and attend sisterhood events.
As I write this post, I didn't know what exactly was going to transpire but now I think after getting my thoughts on paper, I understand my thoughts better. At the end of the day, this all gets done because I really enjoy what I'm doing. Yeah, there aren't enough hours in the day. Every single day, I wish I had just two more hours to get in some extra sleep or work on a paper or call my mom on the phone. But stress results from things you care about. If I didn't care about Daily Dose of Prep or my major or giving tours or my sisterhood or my job, I wouldn't be up until all hours of the morning. Yes, I'm stressed. Every day I acknowledge my stress, I stress about it (like I need that🙄) but I find a way to make it work. I guess that's how it all gets done in a day.
Find what you love. If you can find something that you can be okay with doing, even at late hours of the monring, then you've found something worth doing. So when you feel like you're about to lose it all, about to throw in the towel remind yourself why you're working so hard and I promise, everything will be alright.
