How the Doctor Saved My Sanity

There are some days you wake up and feel like you have the world in the palm of your hand. You're ready and eager to battle any challenge thrown at you.

There are other days when you wake up feeling like everything you've ever done has been a mistake and the pathetic, abysmal life your living now is only a result of the poor choices you've made.

Today was neither of those days.

Today, I woke up in my bed for the 70-something-ish time this summer feeling as if I might just walk away from everything I've ever known if the right opportunity passed me by. I didn't have anything keeping me where I was, besides maybe a signature on a nine-month lease agreement, and suddenly everything felt like it needed to change. Thus I began to wonder...

The following is a list of things I compiled not keeping me where I currently am:

-two mediocre, dead-end, part-time jobs.
-three permanent (and one not-so-permanent) roommates of whom I loathe and despise.
-an apartment next door to the university I just graduated from three months ago.

Sounds really appealing, right? A recent college graduate with a bachelor's degree and all I had to show for it were two $8/hr jobs and a shitty home life. I could have gotten all of those things without going to college and spent about $90,000 less of money I didn't even have.

But then there had to be something good about what I was doing...

The following is a list of things I compiled keeping me where I currently am:

-The aforementioned $90,000 in school debt.
-Two bank accounts with a dazzling grand total of $178.36.
-That damned lease agreement.

After carefully and thoroughly studying the two lists, I made a rather shocking discovery -- neither contained a single positive item. But how did this make sense? There was supposed to be some good in there somewhere. I mean, isn't that why they called it "pros and cons" and not just "cons and cons"? Suddenly my world began to blur and I felt like I was being swallowed up and suffocated by the air around me.

Breathe. I had to remember to breathe.

Two emotionally draining hours of worrying and a silent crying session into my pillow later, a thought popped into my mind which hadn't occurred to me before: maybe the reason I was so unhappy was because I never even gave myself the opportunity to actually enjoy what I was doing, even if it wasn't exactly what I had planned in the grand scheme for my life.

Then it hit me. Stress. I could not remember a time when I didn't feel overwhelmed by some aspect in my life. Four years of college was basically a breeding ground for unhealthy mental behaviors and I'd succumbed to an unendurable hopelessness that haunted me even after I had left the world of academia. I couldn't seem to shake it off. Bills. Debt. Roommates. Family. There it was, the dark shadow of doom, hiding around every corner.

As I was contemplating this theory, I glanced at a piece of art I'd done, hanging on my bedroom wall. On it was a quote that read: "The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant." 

There it was, hanging above my head all along. The answer to all my problems. I was looking at everything through the wrong lens. I needed to adjust the focus and put away the shades. Leave it to Doctor Who to inspire within me a new attitude.

While keeping the wisdom of the Doctor in mind, I created a new list.

My pile of good things:

-living independently on my own for the first time in my entire life without the help of anyone else.
-having the opportunity to be a part of what a I love most dearly in life, theatre, and doing it with people whom I've genuinely come to enjoy.
-being employed at two different businesses while some people have no jobs at all.
-forming even stronger relationships with some close friends and being able to share in the happiness of one of my best friends as she begins to plan her wedding.
-being single and having no one to answer to or tie me down.

While I still find it difficult to define many of the events, obstacles, and situations in my life as positive, I've spent most of the day working on my perception of the things I don't necessarily find appealing. I really believe that with a little work I can start to change my mindset and learn to alleviate some of this unwanted stress in my life. I can't change everything, of course, there will always be bills to pay and lessons to learn -- that pile of bad things -- but at the very least I can open myself up the things that I have good in life and allow myself to embrace their potential.