Psych in Your Life

Oh… The worst sort of stress out there. Money stress…

When I first turned eighteen I almost immediately got a credit card. The bank approved me for $500. Well that was spent within the month. I had a good part time job, but every time I paid a bit of it off, I bought more things. This kept happening. 

After a couple months I decided to switch bank accounts. I wanted to leave TD Canada Trust, and moved over to BMO. I still kept my Credit Card from TD, but also applied for another Credit Card. This card had a $1000 limit. Soon enough this card was maxed out as well. I soon after also applied for another credit card from Capital One card with a $750 credit limit. 

By time I was nineteen I had over $2500 in credit card debt.

I didn’t even know what to do with it. My average pay cheque was only $300 dollars. I kept my debt a secret from my family, because I did not want them involved. 

I kept drowning in interest payments, and my credit score was getting worse and worse. I was freaking out. I didn’t know what to do. I had to seek out help. I went to my parents, I told them everything.

They were of course upset. Mad. Annoyed. I told them I didn’t know what to do, and I needed their help.

They refused to pay it off completely, but they told me they would match my payments. I still needed to learn my lesson. I agreed readily, but was still stressing out about my credit score, and lack of money. 

After getting help from my parents, I was able to talk to them about it, we made jokes about the mistakes I made with my money. I was now starting to believe that eventually all would be better. I wasn’t feeling nauseous every time I thought about the debt. I was feeling hope. I knew the stress would still exist until it was finally paid off in full, but I had a rough end date.

This happened right after my father woke up from his coma. It was sometime during the month of November. I had ended up missing most to all of my midterms, and some of the teachers at the school were unwilling to assist me in rescheduling my missed exams. Without these marks I wouldn’t stand a chance at actually passing the classes. Nothing I could do would allow me to catch up on the marks that I missed out on…

I was trying do everything I could to keep this to myself, as I knew my family was going through enough already with my father. I tried catch up, I tried to get my teachers to allow me to rewrite the exams I missed, and to redo the homework that I missed out on.

I didn’t want to fail the classes, I had already dropped out of one post-secondary program and didn’t want to fail again. 

By late November I was starting to get sick. The stress about everything was getting to me, my father, school, everything. I was started to wear myself down.

This event in my life did not turn out the way I wanted it to. I was starting to get sick myself. I couldn’t deal with all the stress that was going on in my life. I ended up dropping out of the program as I couldn’t actually catch up with the material.

This stress is something I was not able to deal with effectively. I wasn’t able to use any of the effective ways of dealing with stress. I wasn’t willing to socialize, or belief that it would work out. I was not confident, nor was I able to find any humour in the situation.

This was without a doubt one of the most stressful times that I have ever gone through. I was out of town when my grandmother called me telling me to get home as quickly as possible as my Dad was in the hospital and the doctor informed her that she should gather the family quickly.

My Grandmother is my Mom’s mother, but she couldn’t get a hold of anyone but myself. 

I was about an hour away, but I immediately got in the car and sped home. I got in touch with my older brother, and my mother and told them what had happened. I knew both of them would get to the hospital far quicker than I could ever manage.

After finally getting to the hospital and seeing my Father in the state that he was in, was what finally made me understand the severity of the situation…

He landed up in a coma for more than twelve days. During this time my family and I were all stressed out, we were trying to juggle living in all different places, working, and trying to get to school to explain our absences.

We had to deal with this stress together. It was a stressor that affected all of us. I knew deep down that my Dad had to way up, I had an immense belief that it wasn’t his time to die, and although I am not a religious person, the amount of prayers that friends, and family were giving us helped me belief that he had to wake up.

I knew that this stress wasn’t going to end anytime soon, so my family and I would sit in the hospital room with him, sharing stories, and drinking with each other (Probably not allowed, but we had several flasks). We laughed, we cried, and we eventually learned how to deal with this situation to the best of our ability for the next couple of weeks.

This event happened when I was much younger. Somewhere in between fourteen and fifteen. My friends and I were walking the halls of our highschool, we were late to a class in our tech hall (where all the older ‘bad kids’) hung around.

When we turned the corner towards the hall there was an evident altercation that was occurring, we hurried over to see what was going on, but a crowd was already there. Within moments the principal and vice principals were their breaking up the fight. They shooed us all away and told us to get to class right away. After arriving to class, it was evidently the only thing we could talk about. Everyone was discussing what had happened.

The only thing though... Everyone had a different account of what had actually occurred, and everyone swear they saw different people actually fighting. I thought I had saw a certain grade twelve fighting, but apparently the perpetrator was a grade eleven boy.

Just recently I was involved in a hit and run. I was driving down the Highway 401 with my youngest brother in the passenger seat, and we were about twenty minutes away from Toronto. We had just left Guelph. It was rather early in the afternoon, but their seemed to be an inordinate amount of transport trucks on the road. 

We were in the middle lane on the express side of the highway when a transport truck decided to switch lanes. Unfortunately I was directly beside the truck when it was moving over. I knew that if I slammed on my breaks I would have probably been caught underneath the bed of the truck (I drove a sunfire) so I quickly geared into the fast lane, without even checking my blind spot. The roads were busy I knew deep down someone had to be their but I had my seven year old brother in the passenger side back seat, and the impact from the truck would for sure kill him immediately. After switch lanes so fast I smashed into a mid-sized sedan driving in the fast lane, and pretty much ripped off the entire part of the driver’s side of the vehicle. 

After coming to a halt both me and my brother were clearly quite shaken up, but not harmed. I tried to get the licence plate of the truck but I couldn’t see it all. I knew it started with a ‘b’ and had a metro label on it. I was unable to open my door so I had to crawl over the center console so I could open the passenger side door. People were already stopping, but I wanted to get my brother out of the car, and check on the other driver. 

Once my brother was out of the vehicle and we go over to the far shoulder on the fast lane side, the driver of the car that I hit came over and said he had called the police, and he saw everything. He saw that the driver of the grey truck, with a president’s choice label on it changed lanes, and I would been hit severely if I hadn’t moved over right away.

I was positive of what I saw, but the other driver had people in his car who collaborated what he saw.

Eyes aren’t what they use to be…

There have been times in my life where I was asked to either recall either a situation or an individual to the police or a third party.

When I was in my teenage years I was walking home from a party I went to, and it was really late into the night, and everything was quite dark. I felt like someone was following me, I kept looking back to see if anyone was following me, but I never could actually see anyone following me. After a block or so I just determined that it must just be in my head, but after another block I felt someone push me. I fell over immediately, he had a knife and asked me for both my cell phone and my wallet. I obviously handed my items over right away, he took them and bolted down the street. I got up and ran home so I could call the police. 

When I got home I woke my parents, and they called the police. When the police finally arrived they asked me what had happened, I told them what had occurred, and they asked me to describe the man who mugged me. I described the guy to the best of my ability... He was a white man, about thirty years old, shaggy brown hair, and about six feet tall.

This is the description I gave the police, was apparently nothing even close to who apparently mugged me, when I went back to school the following school day, it was a well known thing that I had gotten mugged, and it was the brother of one of my classmates. My classmate had me meet him at his house where his brother gave me the items back. He was at the most twenty, with shortish black, and was shorter then myself..

At the end of every month bills start arriving at my house. Most common means is of course through the mail. Paying off bills, and trying to figure out where best to allocate the little amount of money I get a month can easily begin to stress me out... As it would to most people. I usually cannot afford to pay everything off at the end of the month. One bill, for example the phone bill, or the internet bill does not get paid in full at the end of the month.

This can easily stress out people who have a high external locus of control, as they could start to blame others for their inability to not pay their bills. For example they could blame their work for not giving them enough hours, the economy for making everything so expensive, or even school for costing so much money.

I have always had a tough time in school. Not because I find the work to be overtly difficult, more simply because I am one of the world’s finest procrastinators. If it can be procrastinated then it more than likely will be. Right up to the absolute last minute. 

If an exam is coming up, I know that I need to start studying at least two week before it begins. I understand that it needs to be done. But it won’t start to even phase my stress levels until at least two days before the exam. Two days before the exam I will begin stressing about all that I have to do, and all the material that I have to cover. I will be so worried about the amount of work that I have to accomplish that I will again put it off by doing trivial items or tasks that do not actually matter in the long term assessment of the class.

After actually taking the exam that I was more then likely ill prepared for, I forget that this is actually my fault. I will at the time decide that the reason that I was not able to retain the information is someone else fault. It was my teachers fault, or the course was set up incorrectly, or at the very least somebody or something was in my way of succeeding.

Over the years I have determined that I have a mix of both internal and external locus of control. It strongly depends on the situation at hand. 

For example I am one of the laziest individuals when it comes to certain aspects of housework. I can easily walk by a mess of either clothes, or recyclables that are lying about my room, and not care in the slightest about it. It would stress me out at all, but if I were to notice a sink full of dirty dished, it would begin to stress me out almost immediately. I cannot stand a sink full of dishes and it grosses me out almost immediately and I will begin to worry that if it is not done soon, then the dished will keep piling up and it will be harder and harder to actually finish the task.