I’m not sure where exactly it started to go wrong, but nevertheless, it was one of those days when you wake up thinking you’re actually pretty ahead of the game — and then by noon, you realize you can’t recall the last time you were so overwhelmed.
It feels trivial to recall the events now, for putting them to paper makes them somehow seem smaller than they first felt. I suppose the bulk of my issues stemmed from the fact that my car had been broken down for weeks. In between classes, I had taken it to mechanic after mechanic, locally and in nearby cities — all were only stumped by the problem, all offered a referral. Ten straight days of this, and I felt like I had spent half the semester running in circles, only to find no answer.
Somewhere in between that time, I found out — after a two-hour phone call with USPS — that my passport had been mysteriously lost in the mail. In between taking my car to the mechanic, I was applying for a new passport and preparing to send three visa applications to various consulates before a fast-approaching deadline.
Throughout this, I kept trying to remind myself these were all fixable problems — and, ultimately, not bad ones to have. While it was a nuisance to have a broken car, at least I had a car to break. While it was a bother to lose a passport, I had only lost it because I was in the process of preparing to travel to a series of countries in the coming semester. These were not end-of-the-world or unfixable issues.
Yet, in the heat of them, I felt totally overwhelmed, pulled in opposing directions. Having just gotten off of another lengthy, “please-hold-please,” elevator-music-soundtracked phone call with the postal service, I passed a friend who asked how my day was going.
I was honest, no holds barred.
“Gah,” I let out. “Just caught wind that USPS lost my passport,” I began before rattling off items from my to-do list, offering more information than he probably wanted.
“That sucks!” my friend sympathized. “But hey, at least you’re not me. I just found out we’ve got bugs all over our house and now I’ve got to have an exterminator come.”
His words “at least you’re not me” struck me, because it suggested that he thought his problems were surely worse than mine. In a way, of course, he was right — my problems were, in no way, the worst they could be. But just as this friend thought he had it worse off than me, my initial thoughts were that I had it worse off than him.
Why do we create this competition? It was an especially odd bout of cognitive dissonance. Why did I want to believe that my problems were larger, grander, tougher to solve than another person’s? I knew they weren’t, so why did I want to imagine they were?
Yet, what I needed perhaps most of all in that moment was a reminder that I — surprise, surprise — am not the only one who faced the occasional barrage of stressful events, and that I am not the only one that battles bumps along my road. Here I had been running around, feeling simultaneously entitled to visible stress because of my circumstances, and decent because I had allegedly recognized the privilege of my “problems.”
But I had basked more in the former than the latter. I had used these annoying occurrences as excuses and reasoning for feeling tired, scatterbrained and stretched-out. I could have — I should have — been spending more time checking myself, reducing the seeming size of my own troubles rather than belittling the day-to-day struggles of others.
Self-pity is surely permissible in certain doses. But there’s a hypocrisy in allowing yourself to wallow in the seeming hellishness of problems that even you admit are not really problems at all. In telling yourself that, even though you admit your problems are pint-sized in the grand scheme of things, you somehow deserve more pity than others facing similarly-sized scenarios.
Interestingly, when I was facing this alleged onslaught of complications, I got by by relying heavily on the help of others. Numerous friends offered their cars so that I could still get to my job in Richmond every Friday while my vehicle was out of commission. My friendly, middle-aged neighbor insisted upon driving me to and from the many mechanics. When I had to buy new, two-by-two photos for my passport application after having just paid for them a few weeks prior, the CVS attendant recognized me, realized my predicament, and gave me the pictures for only $1 as opposed to $15. Similar examples abound.
Perhaps in remembering the stress that even the smallest of situations can cause, one develops a little more empathy. Rather than reducing the mountains of others to mere molehills in order to make you own pains seem warranted, think back to the last time you were in a similar scenario and make that mountain a little less insurmountable by helping out a friend or stranger.
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