What Lessons Learned in 2022 Will Impact My Goals For 2023 by Noah

What Lessons Learned in 2022 Will Impact My Goals For 2023 by Noah - December 2022 Scholarship Essay

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Introduction
2022, I most definitely will not miss you. This year was honestly one of the hardest years of my life, and to say there were many lessons learned would be an understatement. There were small ones, like that you should never enter abandoned buildings at night in downtown New Orleans (most people could figure that one but not myself I suppose). Or that driving through the “boonies'' in the middle of Kentucky on a Friday night is asking for trouble (yeah…). To the bigger lesson that I’ll talk about a little later. Despite all of the hardship, trials and tribulations, I’m going to finish out the year on what I’d like to think is a pretty strong note, and for that I am grateful. But it wouldn’t have happened without some trial and error, and some hard lessons learned.
Let Me Explain…

今年我花了九12个月啊ay from my significant other while they were away on active duty military orders. This was hard on us as a couple, but also affected other aspects of our lives such as our mental health, our finances, school, etc. While all of this was very strenuous for us, I think it taught us a very important lesson, and that lesson is that you must have a way of decompressing, and preventing stress from building up and eating you alive. When bills were due, school work was piling up, I was working seventy hour weeks and I was living in what felt like solitary confinement, it would have been really easy to just throw my hands up and collapse. To be honest, I don’t think any of the people around me at the time would have blamed me either. As appealing as this sounded, I made the decision to take a step back and find a way to rid myself of the stress. Over time it became apparent that I was going to need more than just one way to exude the stress, as that one option may not always be available. So as I experimented I discovered my jewel in the crown, which was running. Runner ups included getting Swig, taking my dogs to the park, and buying myself collectibles (treating myself, if you will).

This may sound like a pretty straightforward assemblage of a problem and a solution, but I don’t feel that enough people are aware that they even have a solution to their problems available at their fingertips such as that of finding releases like mine, or potentially something completely different (to each their own and what not). I feel that a lot of people just turn to compressing that stress and pushing it down to somewhere where they don’t have to look at it or think about it, until it eventually comes back out to haunt them, and in my opinion, the idea that you’re expected to do that is absurd, and should be erased as a societal norm.

The lesson I learned is one that I intend to pass on to my children and one I have passed on to those close to me, because it’s one that everyone could implement into their lives for the sake of self betterment. Life is a lot sometimes, and it may be hard to know when or how to step back and just breathe. College students such as myself especially need to implement a system such as this into their lives. So the next time your dog shredded your mattress, your car needs new tires and your wife might be pregnant, do yourself a favor. Scream into a pillow, grab a coffee (maybe make it dirty) and let yourself feel that stress, I promise it will feel so much better.