Transcript
By: Richard Atkins, Jr. 9-21-18 California -Essay- “Avoid Stress At All Cost” First and foremost, you occupy most of your time with what you love. That can be family, kids, your girlfriend/or wife, a certain television show etc. That’s how you avoid dwelling on things that’s out of your control. For example: I lost many friends growing up in a gang, with the notorious crips, and I started to feel that God didn’t love me. So I ignored their funerals as if they was still with us. By missing the funerals, I felt that I was able to avoid the sadness, the misery and all the pain knocking at my front door. That’s how I was able to cope with the lost of my close friends, and some family members. I’ve thought about suicide maybe three times, but imagining my mother’s grief; her pain tossed them thoughts aside everytime… As the years went by and I matured, I beginned to understand the game of life. The chess game, that I never knew I was living. I didn’t understand if I was a pawn, king, or a knight. But with my life, I was making moves for the best, but mostly for the worse. And instead of allowing the stress to penetrate my life, I just kept moving ahead in the game. Trying to avoid checkmate… I only feared the man upstairs and so I wasn’t afraid of the dark. Afraid of all the murders, pain and tragedies surrounding my young life. As a teenager, I wasn’t focused on making any money or learning stocks/bonds. I was only focused on having sex with girls, smoking weed, drinking alcohol, and fighting my gang rivals... That lifestyle helped me to escape the stress, the poverty, the lost of friends/family and the physical abuse I suffered by my step-father. I used to wonder why we was so poor? Why black people/or African-Americans had it so hard. My life was a mess, but I also ignored all of my misfortunes and gained strength by using marijuana on a daily basis. That was the defense mechanism I learned to use to cope with my every day life. And how I still escape the stress. My mother, kicked me out from under her roof when I was just 13 years old! When do you ever hear about Timothy, Joshua, or Brad being told to leave their suburban home?! There’d be an amber alert in 24 hours! I jumped into the deep end, without any stress involved and I was moving full speed ahead... A close friend of mine lost his 18 month son to cancer. I heard and seen the tears, felt his pain; his lost as best as I could for having never lost a child and explained to him that there was only one thing he could do. He asked me, what? I told him, if he wanted to erase all the pain, that he needed to delete all his memories of his little boy… Sounds harsh but if you delete what you can’t change, you rid yourself of the stress. These methods I used as a youth prepared me for any and everything, I would be faced with. And these methods, created space between me and stress… You stress, when you’re dwelling on something that’s out of your control. Something that didn’t go your way. And that’s a waste of thoughts; energy. When you, “avoid stress at all cost” you become stronger than average walking this planet… and a peace of mind finds you, along with God. peace
