Growing Up With Pressure That Never Really Leaves

Can I ever do away with pressure? It comes in different ways, at different times and from different people in different season. Even as a child, I remember how I had the pressure of being the eldest to two siblings and must be careful of how I act, care for them and play the mother role earlier than I should have because mum had left.

Becoming a teenager, I had the pressure to do even better in my studies, get good grades and pass my high school final exam so I could go to the university my family wanted me to. It was my choice too but the pressure to not fail was bigger than I could bear back then. Maybe the expectations faded when I didn't meet the cut off.

But the pressure came back when I had to live among my peers in the university. Others are getting a side hustle, both good and bad, to spend extravagantly as students but I was in my space trying to manage the little I could make for myself with the small allowances I got from home, was the pressure to live under my means.

The pressure to study and get good grades in the courses I was offering were there too, I was able to cope to an extent until I graduated. One would think pressure will end someway but they just increase with time and in different phases of my life. I became a graduate and the pressure to make money or get married fell on me faintly.

I say faintly because I am blessed to have a family who understands the importance of choosing right for marriage so I'm not feeling as much pressure as I had felt when I had to play a mother figure as a teenage girl. But the pressure to make money and get my family to a better comfort still remains and boiling hot inside me.

It makes me pressure myself to taking decisions that will help me get out of the pressure. The only way I see out of this pressure is to actually start making good money and it begins with having a value I can sell or get a job I'll learn on and build value over time. Because of this, I've noticed how I can't seem to fight pressure but live through it.

It isn't as scary as it may sound for me, because I've learned to find the times when I step away from it and just be me, at my own pace then I get back on it for motivation, the push to keep going for my life to change one action at a time. I know I'll get to live the life I want, more pressure will come but I'm positive with my feelings in all this.