Every once in a while I look at an image of myself through my mind and I focus on my hair. Do i have white hair? And then a recurring phrase etched into my mind runs through my head.
It goes like this:”Oh my, you have so much grey hair. Have you been really stressed recently?”
And every time that phrase is met with a recurring answer: “No, I don’t think so.”
Every time.
But not this time.
This time, as the question flashes through my mind, it’s met with an unexpected answer.
And the question doesn’t fade away, yet it lingers as the fact settles in my mind, the fact that maybe I AM stressed; a concept that I thought was only reserved for toiling middle-aged men where every day was a quest to provide food on the table.
Ever since I was young, there was always this mindset that i was directed to grow into. A mindset to learn, to explore and to immerse myself in all the revelations and mind-bending technology and discoveries that humans have evolved to create and understand, and till recently, it was just an intentional effort. But recently, it has taken the front seat of my life.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve never been the best at anything. I’ve never been the most athletic child, I was never the smartest kid in the room, and I was never the wittiest kid in the room and I was most definitely never the most charismatic person in the room. In any other time this would be okay, but in todays world when external validation has become a pervasive desire amongst the generation, I had to find a way to fulfill that desire, and if not through external validation, it had to be from an even stronger source – internal validation.
Hence, the pursuit of internal validation was accompanied by an anvil of pressure crushing down on my skull. I find myself constantly pressured to achieve something larger than my life, to work on something groundbreaking or marvellous, or to research, study, and immerse myself in the plethora of engineering marvels we’ve developed over our existence. Furthermore, amongst all of this is also an insatiable desire to work my ass of on something so fucking insane that at the end of it I can finally look at it, back at myself and exhale a sigh of relief as I realise that “yes, I have made it” – a feeling that very few things can and will ever bring me.
As a result of this desire, I’ve also noticed a shift in routines, habits and personality. I spend hours down rabbit holes of concepts I may never ever be able to wrap around, I stay up nights sleepless working on Fusion360 or Openrocket working on the most random things that strike my mind, and more lightly, I find myself filled with enthusiasm as my lips curve to pull a smile onto my face, as I watch Cillian Murphy realise that he is now death, the destroyer of worlds. And finally, the most satirical of all, the shift in the way I use the internet; I have finally morphed into the perpetually open multi-tab Firefox user.
Eventually, I’ve come to realise that this internal validation from the desire to achieve something “great” is at the end of the day a coping mechanism that I use to redeem myself from my failures in all other aspects of my life – from never being as great as I strived to be in the sport I love, to never having the social life I’ve always dreamt of, to always wondering if i’m the stupidest person in the room.
So yes, Mom, maybe this time that grey hair really is from all the stress I’ve been a subject to, but at the end of the day, I’ll always love this stress – it’s what kept me sane for so long in the first place.