For college students, societal pressures are handed out like candy on Halloween.
Go to this school. Get these grades. Join this fraternity or that sorority.
From a young age, you are told not to care about what others think of you, but it seems as if the older you get, the less truthful this saying becomes. There is always an unspoken competition between you and everyone else.
You spend hours in Armstrong study rooms and survive the weekend on nothing but Starbucks, water and a plate of French fries from Pulley while trying to convince yourself that if you only study for a few more hours, you'll get that perfect grade.
You spend entirely too much money on clothing and accessories, hoping that it will show the other kids that you're just as rich and just as cool.
Yet despite putting yourself through hours of emotional turmoil, your goal of perfection is still impossible to reach.
Perfection is unattainable. It's a false construct ingrained in our minds to give us some end goal to work toward. Striving for something isn't a bad thing, but when you are trying to reach what isn't real in the first place, you're putting your mental health at risk.
Forty million adults in the U.S suffer from anxiety every year. It's an obvious problem, yet rather than confronting an issue that affects so many, we waste our time trying to impress people who are too caught up in their own bullshit to focus on your efforts in the first place. As a society, we've built up this idea that being anything less than your "best self" at all times means that you're weak, or lacking this superhuman quality that you convince yourself everyone has but you.
Get off Instagram and stop comparing yourself to people you've never met. The picture you're obsessing over is riddled with filters, and the grades you're complaining about are no different than those of the majority of the people in your class.
Endless comparison and your insistence on perfection is robbing you of your peace. It's an awful habit that too many people have fallen into, myself included.
Regardless of your current situation, you are the same person that you have always been. Nothing about you has changed.
Stop beating yourself up by making comparisons to superficial, photoshopped Instagram beauty. Pull yourself together and continue being the bomb-ass person you've always been.
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You'll never be perfect. No one ever will.
Take it from me, a girl who's not so perfect herself.
lumpkibm@miamioh.edu
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