Oxygen

By Kuhu Mukherjee

Imagine drowning and falling into the abyss on an ocean. Silence echoes all around you, darkness begins to engulf you, it feels as though walls begin to close in on you, there is a sinking feeling in your gut, a hollowing feeling in your lungs – a cold and clammy numbness spreads all over your body. You try to open your mouth in order to take in some air, in the feeble attempt to gain support in the obvious lack of oxygen. This extremely solemn situation can also be considered as a parallel to the overbearing amount of stress bothering young adults and how that doesn’t even allow them to live or breathe.

The massive burden similar to that of a giant weighing scale rests upon our shoulders – on which our future hangs in the balance. The weighing scale can be considered as a metaphor to how every young adult is expected to balance each and every person’s expectations with their own reality. This task may become too herculean at a point, which would lead to the entire load of the weighing scale crushing us underneath, giving us not enough room to even breathe. This has now become the situation that none of us can escape – people having unrealistic expectations and false opinions about us has become a dominant part of each and every one of our lives. It is now up to us to realize that none of those things matter, as we know who we are and what we want or need to do, and hence do not need the entire society predetermine those for us. It is integral for us to come to an understanding that instead of working stressfully towards the predecided goal, we must pursue the expectations we have from life – the dreams we have, and not the ones people like teachers, relatives, friends etc. have for us.

Along with setting our own realistic goals and working towards fulfilling them, we must also learn to turn a blind eye towards peoples’ opinion about us. Each person has their own different thought process on how everything in this world is to be perceived. People expect you to be an epitome– great in academics, sports, a person with a perfect sense of appearance and so on. Imagine if we had to adhere to these set criteria in order to bring about changes in our personality. That would lead to us having 7.7 billion sets of criteria with us – seems like a pretty huge number, doesn’t it? The sense that every person’s opinion matters, creates an overwhelming feeling which once again causes a build up of tension in the teenager’s brain and in fact leads to a sense of suffocation. This restrictive, gloomy internal atmosphere created can be broken by us, realizing that a person’s opinion about you shouldn’t push you to make a complete change in your personality. I would like to convey this message with a little help from a Charles Dickens novel – In ‘Great Expectations’ he writes, “I have been bent and broken – but I hope – into a better shape”. This can be used in this context as I wholeheartedly believe that even by suffering through several pitfalls in your life, by facing heartbreak; we learn from our mistakes, and begin to get molded into a better version of a person. Instead of trying to hide our flaws, we must learn to embrace them, as that is what makes us unique from each other. All of us are perfect in our own way and there is no one in this world who has the right to predetermine our personality to the way it suits him/ her.

Therefore, as it has been previously, painfully, established- people’s expectations and opinions are this vicious cycle which we can’t break out from if we let it overwhelm us. However, if we believe in ourselves, we will manage to lend ourselves support and help ourselves to break out of the cycle, swim to the surface and finally achieve what we had been craving for – peace aka oxygen.

“Maybe there’s no answer may be this isn’t the answer either. It’s just that loving myself doesn’t require anyone else’s permission.” Answer: Love Myself