Last Year of Torture
Remembering that your health is your first responsibility

Illustration by Cedric Smith| VOX Stafff

Lauren McEwen
VOX Staff

As I see the big 1-8 peeking out at me, I’m buried up to my neck in ever-increasing responsibilities. I miss the good old crayon-scented days of naptimes, Juicy Juice boxes and field trips to the petting zoo. Everything was so wonderfully simple then. Cootie shots cured all my ailments, and a kiss from Mommy could make all of my aches and pains vanish.
Now I am expected to go to school, slave away for pennies at my part-time job and keep up with the impossibly long list of extracurriculars I joined last year to fill up my college applications. Failure became my worst fear. Last semester the thought of not meeting my own expectations began to take its toll on my health.            
After having the better part of my senior year punctuated by applications, standardized tests and tension headaches, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I have vowed to purge myself of all unnecessary stressors and actually make times to enjoy my dwindling adolescence.  

And the Stress Begins
It wasn’t always this way. For the first two years of high school I wormed my way out of taking on extra responsibilities with a mixture of tears and excuses that all involved getting used to the big, bad upperclassmen. But by my junior year my mother started using the C-word—college. I began to realize that she was right. I was going to have to set myself apart from the endless list of applicants in order to stand out to any school’s admissions board.
Too self-conscious to subject myself to public ridicule by doing anything remotely physical, I joined every academic club that I qualified for and got my first real job, making an impossible schedule for myself that would eventually spiral out of control.
I was actually looking forward to coming down with a good case of senioritis, but I’ve had no such luck. Weighted with the pressure of playing baby sister to two women who earned full rides to college and law degrees at two of the best schools in the nation, I haven’t exactly had much time to slack off.
Instead I added an internship and a couple of club officer positions to my list of commitments. Never shall a B rear its ugly head on my report card; never shall a day go by without some meeting to rush off to; never shall I be able to sleep in on a Saturday, shower and change into another pair of pajamas. Failure became my worst fear.
This year I have spent all my days rushing to and from school to internship to work and then home to try and get some sleep before getting up to do it all over again. Every day I trudged to school, hoping for a hole in one of my teachers’ lesson plans so that I could get a little sleep. But with a full schedule of Advanced Placement classes, it was hard to find time to doze off.  I knew this would eventually catch up with me.

Insomnia Kicks In
Sure enough, I began losing sleep. Teenage insomnia is not a myth. I tossed and turned each night, waking up at least three times before my alarm began to chime annoyingly. I tried everything from warm milk to counting sheep or cows or whatever. But I woke up each night like clockwork.
The breaking point was when I got into a freak car accident while hitching a ride with one of my friends. Some idiot rear-ended my friend’s car hard enough to smash into her trunk and shatter her windshield. I began having excruciating headaches, which no amount of Tylenol could cure. Afraid that the accident had caused some severe damage to my spinal cord or something, I just pretended nothing was wrong and hoped the pain would go away.
 After about two weeks of suffering in silence, I told my mother. Characteristically, she started to panic and made me a doctor’s appointment the very next day. When I went, the doctor concluded that there was nothing wrong with me physically but that my headaches were coming from all these worries. My stress was literally making me sick.
So I started kicking back enough over-the-counter painkillers to kill a small animal. Only problem was that you tend to build up an immunity to medicine if you take it in large doses. It got so bad that I was tucking economy-sized bottles of 8-hour Tylenol into my purse.
This freaked me out, but it wasn’t until I had a slight nervous breakdown in my Calculus class that I realized that I had to take action. After getting an abysmal grade on a quiz, I actually cried. Yes, cried like a baby whose bottle just went empty. I knew it was time to put an end to all of this stress.

Lauren Time
I sketched out a make-shift calendar on a spare piece of paper, checking off all of my appointments as they passed. Somehow seeing all of this in writing cleared the clutter from my brain. My thoughts stopped chattering, and I could focus on one thing at a time without constantly worrying about forgetting to do something or another. I also added in a few sick days for myself, penning down the days when I would take a slight leave of absence from school and have some good old Lauren time — with Ma’s permission, of course.
My first step was to learn how to say no to people. “No, I can’t help you work on that project that you’ve had two months to finish, but just started last night.” “No, I can’t take over your shift this Saturday.” “No, I don’t want to help you sell cookies for your fundraiser,” et cetera. It may seem a little selfish, but I couldn’t manage to help other people clean up their messes when I was being bombarded at every turn. In the end it was better to say no then to not give my friends my best effort.
Once I mastered this skill, a world of opportunities for laziness opened up. The other day, I actually missed a day of school! I don’t condone skipping under most circumstances, but from time to time people just need a break. I spent the day doing absolutely nothing but stuffing my face and laughing at my idiot-friends. It was wonderful. Even though I can’t afford to make it a habit, taking a step back from my life was the biggest favor I have ever done for myself.
Now I just have to remember that there is only one of me. Even though I would like to be 10 places at once, it just isn’t physically possible. I pushed my body to its limits once before, and it actually fought back. I rarely have those head-splitting pains anymore, but I still have to keep them in mind whenever that next sign-up sheet comes my way. Trying to manage too many responsibilities is like holding water in cupped hands — you will lose the battle no matter how hard you try.
           
Lauren is a senior a Tri-Cities. She is happy to say she now sleeps at night.