Oh, Grow Up.
Recently, someone asked me what the difference is between being an adolescent and an adult.
I just had a birthday on June 27th. I'm twenty-seven now. I don't really feel like a "grown-up", even though I'm a married Mechanical Engineer with a mortgage. My mid-thirties friends assure me that they don't feel "grown-up" either. Neither do my mid-forties friends. Even my mother says she doesn't feel like a grown-up (she just turned fifty-seven, also in June.)
So it's reasonable to discern, then, that "feeling fully and completely like a grown-up" isn't a state I'm likely to ever grow into. Or, maybe it's just the lucky ones who never feel that way.
Still, there needs to be some difference between an adolescent and an adult. Obviously, you can tell when you meet someone where they are at on this spectrum. It has little to do with age. A sixteen year old can become a father and hold down a full-time job as a manager. A thirty year old can still live with their parents and work part-time at a cafe. Because I went to engineering school, most of my friends lead very 'adult' lives, but I do encounter many people my age that seem to be stubbornly clinging to adolescence.
So, coming back to the original question: how does one define the boundary between adolescent and adult? I think for me, the definition comes down to three things:
- Career.
- Responsibility.
- Dealing with Serious Things.
CAREER
Now, by 'career' I don't mean that you wear a suit and tie and have a job-job in an office. Career, to me, means purpose: you have a clear (or clearish) vision of what you want to do with the rest of your life, and the majority of your time is spent actively pursuing it. By this definition, a person who may not even be employed but is actively, fervently pursuing success in a particular field has a 'career'. Of course, our career vision becomes more clear over time, and we may change direction, but as long as we're striding confidently SOMEWHERE as opposed to drifting from one meaningless job to another, we have a 'career'.
RESPONSIBILITY
Both in the having and the taking, responsibility is a major divider between an adolescent and an adult. Living on your own and paying your own rent. Taking accountability for your own failures. Owning a dog, or having a child. It means being present and accountable: without YOU it would fall apart.
DEALING WITH SERIOUS THINGS
A major facet of adulthood is that a considerable portion of your time is spent just dealing with serious things. Things that your parents used to do for you. Boring, painful "ugh it's just gotta get done" things. Taxes, paying bills, repairing things around the house, sorting out insurance, laundry, scheduling your own dentist appointments, investments... "serious things" can also mean injury, disease or death. I guess the best way to define it would be "dealing with things that have real-world, severe consequences." If a care-taker is still doing these things for you, it's a major piece of adulthood you still lack.
One may not have all three of these aspects prominently in their lives, but these are the three things that, for me, divide the adolescents from the adults.
Now...Is "adulthood" the right thing?
Is adulthood something that we SHOULD be pursuing as quickly as possible?
Perhaps, perhaps not. I'm not sure the early-adults are "right", just as much as I'm not sure the late-adults are "wrong". Sometimes I regret becoming so serious so soon. I've always been very responsible and driven, and so I marched lock-step into adulthood without really considering the alternatives. These are just things that I feel define "adulthood", not necessarily the way life should to be lived.
Charging your Adolescent Batteries
Recently, I've been faced with a stack of some very serious, very adult things. It's nothing bad... just boring "ugh it needs to just be DONE sort of things". I've been putting it off.
Last week, for my birthday, I took the week off of work. I didn't go anywhere, and I didn't really have anything concrete that I wanted to accomplish, I just wanted to.....not work.
And oh, boy did I ever NOT work! I woke up when I wanted, wore what I wanted, went where I wanted just 'cause I wanted to. My chores languished, my diet languished, and my work certainly didn't get worked on. I'm proud to say the vacation wasn't wasted, though... I threw myself into my Big Scary Writing Project. I finished chapters 3 and 4, which completes "book one" of the story. I didn't keep count, but I estimate that in this week I slammed down about sixty pages of thumbs! It was awesome.
What I realized at the end of the week is that I was basically acting like an adolescent again! You'd think that after this exhilarating taste of adolescence, I'd never want to go back to adulthood. But, here I am at work on a Monday morning and I'm amazed at how READY I feel to tackle some more "adult" responsibilities! By not being so serious, I got rid of a LOT of stress. So, I guess that's the one learning from this rambling post.
Sometimes you need to un-grow-up to tackle grown-up things 
Depression and Confidence
Went a bit dark for awhile there, I apologize. To be honest I was fighting off some personal demons, depression in particular.
A few things were happening in chorus. I'd just come off Emerald City Comiccon, which was so intense, and amazing and this big release of fear and stress. It was awesome, but the effect that this can have - especially on me - is that when you IMMEDIATELY return to your regular life, it can make the experience feel like it never actually happened. I find that in these situations that I'm prone to falling into my own echo chamber of self doubt.
Usually I can combat this. Usually.
Unfortunately, around the same time I ALSO decided that I'd like to try becoming what I call "more Vegan-aware". I'm vegetarian right now, and this has made such a positive impact on my life and health that I posited "hm, if giving up meat was such a benefit, perhaps doing the additional step of giving up milk and eggs would prove even more beneficial!"
Of course I knew this would be a very challenging thing, so I didn't even TRY to go full on Vegan cold-turkey. That's where "vegan awareness" comes in. I decided to enter a phase where I would become more aware of which foods were and were not vegan and learning to work with the alternatives.
The first phase was to stop buying milk, and this was easy. I tried a few rice milks and then settled on a Soymilk that I like. This was not a problem.
The next phase was trying to give up eggs. Now, I eat a hard-boiled egg every day because I feel it goes a long way to keeping my protein and iron levels up. Of course, this was an assumption and I like to challenge assumptions. I'd tried giving up eggs in February in a "1 week on/1 week off" pattern and I was noticing that I would fall into depression at the end of my off week. I took a break from the experiment for the Emerald Con (I NEED the energy during cons!) but I had decided that the depression was just a phase that I needed to push through - my body would eventually adjust.
Well, without the benefit of milk to mitigate the effect of dropping the eggs, I went into a much deeper depression than I experienced in February.
I withdrew and I felt very lonely. I lost confidence in everything I was doing, including this blog. I had posts written up already - a few in fact - but I couldn't bring myself to post them. They didn't seem good enough, and I couldn't see how to fix them.
I had very little energy. It was very hard to get up in the morning and go to work (but I did). It got so bad that I caught myself actually hoping that I would get sick so I wouldn't have to go in. I would go home and just crawl into bed and cry for awhile. For no reason in particular. It sucked. I tried to compensate. On a particularly dark day at work, I went out at lunch and bought some intense vegan sources of protein - some cashew nuts, a protein shake, lots of tofu... it got me through the day but it was still rough. I was surviving, but I wasn't myself.
I didn't want to quit, though, because I knew that if I could just hang on, maybe I would adjust. Maybe it would get better.
But I was out of time. When it starts interfering with my work, that's when it's gone too far. I bought a bunch of milk, cheese and eggs and I IMMEDIATELY started to feel better. After a week or two I was starting to feel normal again. That was 1 week before Stumptown comics fest, and I had to push to get everything finished that I'd been too depressed to manage earlier.
But now I'm back. And I'm feeling better. I'm not done with my vegan-leaning experiments, but I definitely have to be more careful. Veganism doesn't cause depression, but I have to come to terms with the fact that I live my life very close to the line. Maybe, because I'm so prone to depression, I'm too sensetive to manage the imbalance caused by dropping milk and eggs. I manage the depression on my own - diet control IS my medication, and I can't take that lightly. Life is too short to go through it depressed.
Lessons learned:
- Listen to your body. Experiments are cool, but if it's interfering with things that are more important to you, tread lightly.
- If you're prone to depression, just recognize that dark days just happen. It's usually not your fault (in this case it probably was my fault ) but your brain is the way it is. Don't give up. Keep moving forward.
So now I'm back to The Work. 
Welcome To The Breaking Point
You can't perform quickly with razor-sharp efficiency all the time. Perfection in that regard is just not possible. As you are constantly testing the upper bounds of possibility, you will sometimes step over the line.
You will break under the stress.
You will freak out.
It's important to acknowledge the emotion and what has happened. Sometimes you just break. Life can be really very overwhelming to someone addicted to achievement.
Calm Down.
Shut everything down. Shut off the feeds, the twitter, your phone, the TV news. None of that is important. Trust me, it will not explode if you leave it be for a few hours. It probably will chug along happily without you for a few days as you recover your sanity.
Remember the goal. The end goal is happiness, and to get there you need to focus on being happy EVERY DAY. You need to focus on being happy TODAY.
1) Let it out.
Find a safe place where you can be alone. Scream and cry. Acknowledge that you've pushed yourself too hard, you're broken now. You've got to break completely before you can begin the recovery process. Acknowledge that it will take a few days for you to get back to your peak performance. Be okay with that. Pushing now will only make the problem worse.
2) First let go of the anger.
There will be anger and sadness. Sadness slows you down, but anger actually damages the things around you. Every time something pokes at you and starts causing rage, try to suppress it with logic. The annoying stuck door is not a crisis. That is not what is actually bothering you, screaming and punching people is not helping anything or anyone. Breathe, Breathe.
It's okay to be sad for awhile. Accept that you are going to have a sad day, and tell yourself that it is okay. You are sad. It doesn't need a reason, it might not make sense. As long as you are not angry, be okay with sad.
3) Forget your original task list.
That was a "stretch" task list, and you've stretched too far. Turn off the timer. Try to stay out of meetings. Don't think about goals. Don't think about what others think. Just breathe. Just be.
4) Write a list of only the small things that need to get done
- everything that absolutely MUST to get done and overwith and out of your way. Put away all your longer term goals, stretch goals, working-for-the-distant-future goals. You're in recovery. You just need to get by.
5) Get by.
Tell yourself that you're going to clean today and get things off your list. That today you're just going to be sad and survive.
6) Act.
Move slowly and deliberately. Get things done in the slowest, calmest way that you possibly can. Be sad, be calm.
At the end of the day, if you managed to go the whole day just being sad and not angry, evaluate how your day went. Did the world explode without you performing at your miracle, superspeed level?
No.
When you're bored with being sad, get back to the things that make you happy.
Stop Stressing Out About Everything!
Sometimes it feels like you can't possibly finish everything you HAVE to get done between now and a certain deadline.
So you stress out about it.
But that is a waste of your emotional energy, and when you waste emotional energy you are draining the very energy that you NEED to get all of that done.
When I'm tearing around the house shouting "Aaaa! I'm so STRESSED OUT!"
My husband says "Well, stop stressing out then!"
We all know it's not that simple, but over time I learned that it WAS something that I could control, to a certain degree.
- Recognize that stressing out is a waste of your energy
- Write down everything you need to do before the deadline. Remember: NEED to do - not probably should do.
- Prioritize. Be ruthless!
- Work from the top of the list down.
There's no use stressing out over what you need to do. Just calm down and do it.
What to do when you’re STRESSED OUT!
Sometimes it feels like you can't possibly finish everything you HAVE to get done between now and a certainly deadline.
So you stress out about it.
But that is a waste of your emotional energy, and when you waste emotional energy you are draining the energy that you need to get all of that done.
When I'm tearing around the house shouting "Aaaa! I'm so STRESSED OUT!"
My husband says "So? Stop stressing out!"
We all know it's not that simple, but over time I learned that my stress level WAS something that I could control, to a certain degree.
1) Recognize that stressing out is a waste of your energy
The state of being under stress is not something you can control, but you can control your behaviour: how you respond to it. A stressed out person is frantic, edgy, shouts, runs around trying to do everything at once. A not-stresed out person is calm. Speaks softly. Addresses one problem at a time. Ignores the unimportant. Change your behavior to match the non-stressed (even if you are) and it will help change your mood.
2) Write down everything you need to do before the deadline. Remember: NEED to do - not probably should do.
This is an emergency! I don't have time to write a stupid list!
This is an emergency. This the time when you ABSOLUTELY need to focus only on what is critical.
3) Prioritize.
What are the consequences of letting something slide for an hour? a day? a week? a month, even? If it's not on fire TODAY, put it at the bottom of the list. Remember your BIG ROCKS.
If there are still lots of things that need to get done, do they absolutely have to get done BY YOU? Are there things you can take care of by phone or online? Can you get your friend, husband, or coworker to take one or two tasks off your plate? Can you hire a task out instead of doing it yourself?
Be RUTHLESS with your list. Focus. Survive.
4) Work from the top of the list down.
Ignore everything that can be ignored, starting with everything electronic. If it isn't a call you are expecting, related to the urgent tasks at hand, let it go to voicemail. Answer them in batches after lunch or at the end of the day. Politely tell people that you're dealing with a crisis and would prefer if you could talk to them later.
Bail out of meetings, or ask whether they can be moved.
Keep at problem #1 like a dog on a bone until you can cleanly scratch it off the list. Then work diligently on the next.
Remember that stress is a response, not a mandatory state of being when you're busy.
There's no use stressing out over what you need to do. Just calm down and do it.
Know your Energy Cycle – Maximize your Productivity!
We all have ups and downs in our day, times when we're really alert and active and other times when we're really sleepy and drained. But are you working WITH your ups and downs or AGAINST them? A good way to tell is to map out your own stress/energy cycle.
Below is a sketch of my Stress/Energy cycle. Now, I must emphasize, in big fat capital letters: THIS IS - ANGELA'S - STRESS/ENERGY CYCLE - I'm using it as an example, but you need to build your own!
My Creative Energy and Stress Throughout the Day
Goal Setting 5 – the RANT
"Don't complain", we're told. We either get scolded for being unappreciative, or it becomes a competition.
"You think you're fat? What are you complaining for, I weigh 200lbs more than you!" Or, "You think YOUR job is tough, you've got it easy! Let me tell you--"
They're right-- you shouldn't complain. At least... not to them. In public you should be grateful for what you have, take problems in stride, and put on a strong face.
But it's natural to complainin. The urge to complain is your mind's way of telling you that something is wrong, something is making you unhappy.
That is the origin of this goal-setting excercise. If you don't know where you want to go, or why you're unhappy, just open up a notepad doc (or a pen and paper if you prefer) and start writing. Some might prefer to speak their rant out loud, but I find when I speak, it's harder to analyze what I've said and dig deeper into why it came out. The rant itself is just the leaves of the weed. Just "getting it out" might make you feel better, but to get your goals out if it, you'll need ot pull up the roots.
Go. Start writing. Once you've opened up the floodgates, let loose about everything you HATE in your life. Even the things you don't really hate, but just annoy you a lot. Don't worry about spelling or grammar, just keep letting the words flow onto the page. Some things might come up that surprise you - dig deeper.
As you continue, narrow it down to PRECISELY what it is that you hate. Is it really the toast that your roommate left on the counter that bothers you? Or is it the fact that you can't yet afford a place of your own?
Drill down and clarify those annoyances, down to the largest root-cause problems in your life. Now you've found your GOALS: to fix every one of those problems.
Sanity Management: Introduction
Calgary, Alberta
YOU ARE YOUR OWN OPPONENT
Energy Management: Intro
Nanaimo, BC
Prioritizing: Five Questions You Should Ask Yourself
Car Garden in Toronto, Ontario
1) If I DON'T do this right now, what is the worst thing that could happen?
- Really step out of your current situation and look at your tasks as if you were an outsider. If you don't get enough money to pay the rent on time, you'll get evicted. If you don't finish your essay on time, you'll lose some credit towards a grade. If you don't submit a piece to an online contest, some person on the internet might be a bit disappointed. Now, in hindsight, getting evicted because you skipped work to finish that piece for the online contest would seem pretty silly. When you're emotionally wrapped up in the contest, it can seem like a really tough choice to make, but really boil things down to THE WORST thing that will happen. If you finish your shift at work, then your essay, you might still have time to submit something to the contest (bonus)! But if you did things in the opposite order, the consequences are much more severe.