I awoke in the morning as tired as I had been the night before. Two questions immediately popped into my mind. 1. What assignments did I forget to do yesterday? and 2. When is the next time I am going to be able to sleep today?

These are the same questions that I have been asking myself since the start of the Spring Semester here at Delta State.

My daily self-questioning was followed by a mandatory glance at my phone with hope in my heart that I woke up early enough to go back to sleep. As soon as saw that the date was Insert Any Month Here 1st, another stressful question was added onto my routine: Do I have enough money in my bank account to pay this month’s rent?

This question was quickly met with an internal, “of course I do!” What else am I working two stress-manufacturing jobs for?  I got out of bed and begrudgingly filled out another monthly $400-dollar rental check that would land a crippling blow on my account.

After finishing up my monthly will and getting ready for the day, I encountered one of my roommates in the living room. He had the same dejected, or should I say defeated, look that I was also wearing.

“We chose to live here, right?” he asked me. I did not answer orally, but forcibly put a smile on my face and nodded. I grabbed his own will and slid it into the envelope next my own, then headed out of the front door to embrace the stress filled day I knew was waiting for me.

As soon as I stepped out of the house, my overly optimistic way of thinking went into full effect. So what that the birds who nest in the overgrown Magnolia tree gave your car a fresh coat of paint? So what you’re throwing another $400 dollars into a rental house that you will never own? As long as you’re alive and well, things are fine.

This could not be further from the truth. The amount of stress I was accumulating from school, work, and bills was wearing on my mental and emotional stability, and this overly optimistic thinking was causing me to ignore that fact.

I had to face, and still do, the truth that the stress of student life is not something that can be ignored. After having this small existential crisis, I headed to class.

Pondering my own stress that morning caused an acute awareness of the stress others around me were facing. The stress I was, and still am, facing is not something that is limited to my own college experience.

Almost all conversations I overheard in the hallway and in class that day seemed to revolve around stress. Whether it was a huge mass of assignments being due or a disagreeable work schedule, the problem of stress accumulation was apparent in all the students around me, both in these conversations and the drained expressions they wore on their faces.

Once classes ended for the day, I had to meet with my other roommate to collect his rent payment. This proved a more difficult task than I thought it would be. Our conflicting schedules required one of us to either be late to an evening class or late to work in order to deposit the rent payment in time, adding more stress to what we had already collected throughout the day.

I decided to bite the bullet and be few minutes late to work so the rent would not be deemed late. It was not until after I dropped all three of our wills off to the rental agency that any stress was lifted off my mind. This, of course, was only a momentary relief from stress that would soon gather in mind once again.

That day has long since passed, but the stress that I assessed and broke down during that day is still a large part of my student life. Conversations with my roommates and other fellow students still mostly revolve around the stressful situations we are facing.

Dealing with stress is an aspect of life that is unavoidable, but it is an intimidating fact that almost all aspects of college student life revolve around it.