“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

––David Foster Wallace

Angling myself on a hotel carpet, I looked up at the ceiling uncomfortably when my friend asked me about the meds I was taking, one a blue and green, seemingly plastic-coated capsule, and the other a small, grey rectangular prism. Being an oversharer, I began to outline my 17 year history with anxiety disorders and mild forms of depression, and he laughed, then smiled, then looked somewhat angry. “I have depression too, but I choose not to take meds,” he said looking somewhat grim.

I waited for him to concede that taking meds would be alright, but he remained focused on the left of my face for a while, and then our conversation returned to pleasantries. This, in essence, is when I realized we at Parker have a messed up notion around the idea of easiness.

More recently, standing in the courtyard on a cloudy day, walking around to different booths during our Student Government period, trying to get more information to make a meaningless choice about committee assignments, I had an important realization: I could just leave. I already knew plenty about Parker’s committees, having run the system of committees last year––something that sounds more important than it actually is – plus no one was taking attendance, and the whole charade of walking around aimlessly was giving me a headache.

But I stayed, probably due to inertia, because to a certain degree, I’m used to doing hard things for no reason: I’ve taken hard classes all my life, even those sorts of classes whose hardness isn’t discernible whatsoever to colleges, and socially I’ve been committed to doing my best as an esoteric non-conformist.

Yet, as my friend knows too well, I cave in when it comes to taking meds, and for a while, I’ve felt guilty about it–the fact that as a junior having my sister leaving for college made me too scared and anxious to be sane without them, the fact that since then I’ve been too scared and anxious to try to go off them, the fact that I live each day with a crutch.

Nevertheless, crutches–even frivolous, unnecessary crutches–are not always a bad thing. Perhaps because of our Calvinist roots, our society is incessantly telling us that we need to challenge ourselves, take risks, give our best all the time, but security is not a bad thing in and of itself. Sometimes it’s good, even quite rewarding, to know the world is not contingent on us and that we can lean back from a grind that often mirrors running on a treadmill. In fact, it is these moments of resting, taking the easier path, or simply settling for less than optimal outcomes that give us moments of reflection and perspective that allow us to get outside our own skulls and see what really matters.

When I take two pills every night, I may be denying myself a chance to push myself to my limit, but I know that fundamentally what I am doing is more important: I am telling myself that life is okay, and that, more broadly, okayness is okay. I am certainly not perfect, even compared to what I reasonably could be, but that’s alright. There’s no inherent reason why I have to use that arbitrary scale, or really any scale, to judge myself.

I simply have to do my best to get through the day, doing my best to move the world forward and find some peace, in whatever ways I can, ways not attached to all that I could be doing or becoming. For, if everything is about becoming something, then nothing can simply be anything, until we’re left in the end both tired and restless.

I should settle more often, and you probably should too.