Sometimes the anxiety in your life just keeps building and compounding in on itself.  You say to yourself “you’re ok,” or you simply try to ignore the feeling.  But the nature of anxiety doesn’t quite let up that easily.  It’s relentless in its pursuit to make you feel as nervous and as unsure of yourself as possible.

Especially when things are not quite going your way. Despite how hard you work, and regardless of your good intentions or good deeds…good karma just isn’t quite finding its way to you.

When all that just gets to be too much, it only takes a sobbing character on a show like Glee, to get you to sob uncontrollably…snot, and all.

In all honesty, sometimes you really do have to just cry it out. Releasing all that tension, surprisingly enough, feels really good after. You were so tense before all this, then you let the tears pour forth…and you suddenly feel a little lighter. The situation hasn’t changed. You’re still overwhelmed. But, at least you’ve felt some release from the pressure cooker building in your mind.

I think I’ve come to a couple realizations in all this. While I would love to do well with whatever it is I’m working so hard in, I can only do my best…meaning, after that, it’s out of my hands.  Hard work doesn’t always equal to huge success. So, that equation in my life needs to be discarded, and fast.

There’s also no point in succeeding at something, or not succeeding for that matter, if you’re miserable the whole way there. I enjoy what I study, but I’m not necessarily amazing it. I have at tendency to fixate on my performance, rather on the reasons why I went into science in the first place. Is it really about being brilliant? Or perhaps it’s about how curious you are about the world. I’m hungry to know and understand, but that does not necessarily have to correlate to excellence or mastery. I may just well be the slowest in my class, but I am thorough…isn’t that what it’s all about, anyways?

Whatever the case, I suppose I’ll continue to have these crying sessions, until I fully accept my limitations, and embrace my reasons for pursuing science, and my fixating more on my own personal strengths.

But lets get a couple of things straight here…

Truth: I am not the smartest, nor am I the quickest.

BUT, I love to learn, and can be a pretty damn good teacher. I also ask the right questions, and what I lack in mastery and quickness, I make up for in insight and ingenuity. I may never be the best at what I do, but I don’t know of any major discovery that was every really founded by a person who had the highest IQ. Not even Einstein.

So, all in all (as my sorry excuse of an English professor has so exclaimed) tears lead to other things beside release. They lead to acceptance, resolve, and a willingness to move beyond. I suppose that what Zen must feel like. If only temporarily 😉