Expectations, Pressure and Stress

Disclaimers:

1) This is big.

2) This was made while I was really sleepy, but needed to keep awake in order to sleep at a decent time of the day… Quality may lack.


It’s kinda amazing how much pressure we end up receiving without even noticing. Or well, even if we do notice, it is still very… Amazing.

I remember back when I left my parents’ home and my godmother was pressuring me to find a job (I have some money that barely pays my bills that comes from the pension my father gives me since his divorce with my mother, this lasts for around 2 more years, but it is not something I should rely upon, it’s basically something that I try storing in case of an emergency that requires more money than I have… But back then, that was the only money I had), I wasn’t really against since I did need it, but… Wow, how much of a horrible situation was that, I’m glad that is over.

First, we talked everyday… Might seem a bit weird to consider it as pressure, but it was an enormous pressure to me. I don’t talk to people everyday, I just don’t. If I meet someone I talk to them, if I don’t, I don’t talk… To actively talk everyday about job hunting was incredibly stressful.

Then, we made plans, what was the plan for the week? What was I going to do at each day of the week? Did I do it? Why not? What am I going to do to fix it then? Am I eating properly? How much did I sleep last night? What did I do on my free time today?
This kind of thing was the talk we had every single day, and well… In all honesty, it did work, it was just such a huge bother, and it just felt so sickening to say “I stayed the whole day NUFing, so I didn’t seek any jobs”, that I ended up making my days productive… But dear God, never again do I want to ever have to answer this kind of thing, it was 10x worse than any pressure I ever received from my parents.

It didn’t help that I dropped out of university, so I didn’t quite have much choice in finding a job, so they wanted me to seek pretty much anything… Which can be resumed at working at shoppings, fast foods and the like.
A small addendum, is that working in a shopping is the one profession I absolutely never ever wanted to have. Period. I can give tons of reasons, but the simplest one is… My brother worked at a shopping, and he missed the last birthday of my grandfather because he couldn’t miss work on that day. There is a lot more from his experience working at the shopping that made me absolutely dread it, so the prospects weren’t even the slightly charming.

I remember finding one after a few weeks searching… And I cried when I did… Of hatred. Of hatred and sadness, because the interviewer said to me pretty clearly that I had 0 chances of getting any break on Saturdays, 1 Sunday would be allowed per month, and the rest of the breaks would be in the middle of the week, 1 per week. Salary was also below the minimum wage and I have no idea why it was allowed to have that as a full time job, but… Hey, I needed it, so let’s take it!
… Not. I’m really really glad that they never called me even though everything was done properly and that they guaranteed my spot, made me do medical exam, make a bank account and all that.
The thing is… A few weeks after the interview, it was the 1 year birthday of my cousin, the 1st birthday of my cute cousin that I loved a lot and didn’t have much time together with her… She is the first child of any of my cousins, so she is very… Special. It is something I wouldn’t want to miss no matter what… And it was on a Saturday.

I cried when simply thinking of starting to work. I cried when thinking I would need to work at a fast food 40 minutes away from home just to miss the birthday of my cousin. It was ridiculous.
Absolutely ridiculous… Looking back on it, the whole pressure was ridiculous. Of course I needed a job, if I wanted to be independent, I needed a job, I needed to pay my own bills with my own money, I couldn’t simply depend on my parents’ money forever, especially when I left home after fighting with them.

… However, that didn’t mean it was urgent. I needed to seek a job, but I had time to do it. I didn’t need to find the first job possible and be happy I found something… I could search for alternatives instead, and find a decent job that actually respects labor laws and pays me a minimum wage for once.
In fact, I didn’t even want to work away from home, I wanted to work at home office. And instead I was searching for jobs in places really far from home at the things I dreaded working in the most… It was so… Ridiculous. Why was I buying that?

Another point. Photo. It might seem a bit dumb, but I had also changed my whats app photo from Sakura from CCS to my RL photo, to look more professional. This was… Dreadful.
When you hate looking at your face, the last thing you need is to see it every time you open a chatting app. And I hate tons of things about myself, face included.
I had felt really annoyed at it back then, but I only realized how horrible it was, when I took that photo away from my whats app and put an Alice pic in it instead, the feeling was… Absolutely relieving, like a huge burden had been taken out of my shoulders… Haa… Good things feel good, but getting rid of a bad thing feels a lot better… Unless it’s something really good I guess.

But well, I talked about a lot of stuff in here, but what did I wanted to go on about in the first place with this bunch of examples? 3 things.
Expectations, pressure and stress.

Expectations are simple, everyone has expectations… The problem is that we also have expectations of what other people will do, and we get bothered when they don’t meet our expectations… And when we let it show, it starts bothering them. And that is where pressure comes in.

Pressure is ridiculous. It’s you enforcing what you find right and what you want them to do into someone else, and you do your very best to make sure they move exactly the way you want them to. It’s absurd… And it works. When the other party is feeling weakened, they give in to pressure way way too easily. And that is what happened to me. I was in the “wrong” due to dropping out of uni and leaving home, so I was jobless, not studying, not seeking employment and depending on parents’ money… In a sense, I was a NEET. Not really though, I was seeking jobs, I just wasn’t seeking any job, because I didn’t want that for me, and I had time.
Being put against the corner in the position of a NEET makes you give in to it very quickly though, you are just that one person that is doing everything wrong. And someone needs to “guide” you back to the right path… It’s ridiculous, but the more ridiculous part is that it works… And then we reach the main point. Stress.

Stress builds up, and builds up quickly… And stress kills.
Sure, it won’t make you have a heart attack at 20 years old, but it will leave exhausted, each day will be a pain, each day will be more depressive than it already was, each day will be another day in which you desperately want to run away, but the pressure will come bite you, so you’ll not be able to flee from it, only increasing the stress atop your head.
People end up having expectations of you, and then they put pressure, and pressure makes you feel stress… And well, stress makes you unproductive, which makes you not meet expectations… And then we go in a downwards spiral.

It’s hard to realize that you just… Need to throw it all away.
Sometimes you can’t, or rather, lots of times you can’t. The problem with expectations is that you’re bound to them. Either because they’re from family, or because it’s from work, or friends… Someone always will have expectations from you, and if those expectations actually matter, then this means that it isn’t something you can easily shrug off.

So… Either you deal with it, or you break it. And no way is easy… Breaking means cutting contacts, changing, having a proper stop to it… Keeping up with it just causes more and more stress, and health falls drastically with excessive stress… I feel like I’m becoming a broken record.

I’ve had my fair share of break ups already… There is simply a limit to how much stress I can endure, and when it reaches my breaking point… I break. I break and break what is causing my stress too.
Breaking relationship with a boyfriend, with parents, with godmother… I needed to break it because I wasn’t able to live with the way things were going… When you keep on living every day by crying and self-loathing, you just… Need to make some cuts.
Or rather, you need to take your own life in your hands and stop letting other people order you around as they see fit… And you need to make them realize they can’t do it either.

The worst part of it I think… Is that pressure doesn’t come for no reason.
I said it before, but it comes from expectations… Why do those people let their expectations for you pressure you? Because they care for you. Because they care for you and are worried for you because you don’t meet their expectations.

What they don’t understand though… Is that it is your life. Your life is your own and nobody else’s, and that they shouldn’t go over their boundaries just because they are worried for you.

It’s kinda strange to think of it… But the best way to answer this kind of worries… Is to tell people to scram. I don’t need someone worrying if I will or will not find a job, I don’t need someone worrying if my job is stable or not, I don’t need someone worrying if I’m eating properly… I’m way past the age in which this kind of thing is acceptable, and it feels a tad too wrong to having to deal with it.

In essence, I think that a good part of pressure comes from being treated as a child, or at least the pressure I felt was like that.

By being treated as a child, worrying for you and deciding things for you, they feel like they are protecting you, doing what is best for you… But an adult can make decisions on their own… Being unable to take control of your life when you should is way way too stressful. So there is hardly much of a choice, aside from forcefully taking it at those points… At least IMO.

It makes me start to wonder… When is it okay to stop thinking of someone as a child? When is it okay to stop treating them as a child? And more importantly… When they are a child, how much pressure are you allowed to exert on them?

I feel like most of my life was filled with very little pressure because I didn’t fail to meet most expectations, this only started happening when I was an adult, because what they wanted didn’t fit with what I wanted anymore.
But what if I did fail to meet them? How much pressure is too much then? I had lots of problems on school which were related to bullying and me retaliating it, which was usually met with punishment at home… This never made me stop retaliating, I was still a “problem child” that kept on getting into fights.
Similarly, my brother having terrible grades all across his school life was not solved by parents getting angry at him for not studying… What is one supposed to do then? When does pressure stop being useful and starts being just a bother?

I have a feeling pressuring others is always useless. It might make them work, but the stress will only reduce their efficiency in the long run… I think, if one needs to make someone do something… You need to make them want to do it, not force them to.
But well, God knows how hard that is… Still, I think it is the best way to handle things… On another note, convincing and forcing someone to want to do something are two completely different things.

It’s strange to talk of different types of wanting, but they definitely exist… I wanted to find a job, and I wanted to find a job as quickly as possible… Because I wanted to avoid that stress, I wanted to get rid of that pressure that was eating me from the inside everyday… I didn’t want the job, but I sought it because I wanted. I wanted to get rid of the pressure, and to get rid of the pressure, I needed a job. But I didn’t want a job. Or at least, I didn’t want that job

I talked so much, this got so long… I hope I didn’t repeat myself too much, I did this so horribly sleepy, but I needed to stay up because it was too early to sleep yet… So bothersome.

I wonder if I got any point across… I hope I did.
Well, what was my point anyway though? I’m not sure… I guess I hate being pressured by others, and I don’t know my breaking point… But I know I don’t go any further than it.

Ah, I am already having other ideas of examples of pressures… I really should post this already before I keep on going on and on about it