Sometimes, your new year starts out really crazy. It begins with wine and scrabble with your second family—best friend and her mom—and then it leads into a day in which you sleep eight hours before waking up at 1pm to go to work from 3pm until 11:30pm. Next thing you know, you go home and watch about thirty hours of the show you’ve been binge-watching (in this case for me— “Hart of Dixie”) without stopping to sleep until 11pm after being awake for thirty-four hours. Finally, you sleep for eight hours, wake up, go to church, and go home to take a three-hour nap before going back to work where you end up being the only person taking calls for the last hour and end up with five calls in queue when the queue is closed which leads to working through the eighteen minutes that are usually reserved for closers to basically just chill and twelve minutes on top of that which leads to your first ten minutes of overtime ever. And all of that ends in you arriving at Whataburger (local Texas burger joint) at 2am after getting off work 1:27am to use the bathroom, only to end up eating a 2-piece kid’s chicken strip meal with the fries, a cookie, and a medium onion ring while watching the next show you’ve chosen to start watching “The O.C.” (because I like to watch everything I can find with stars in it from the things I binge watch) Normally, I’m not one to eat away my stress, but I was hungry and it was better than the alternative of what I normally do—stress out until I have an anxiety attack.
If you read my last post, then you know that my new year’s resolution for spiritual development this year is to remember Jehovah Shalom— “The Lord is my Savior” –and I will not worthy. Before, like a week ago, when I decided that I would stop saying “I’m an anxious person,” and dwelling on the things that make me anxious, I would have handled this stressful weekend of no sleep in a very different manner. A lot of people, even the invisible people in queue at a call center, give me social anxiety, especially when they’re the customers that I’m responsible for helping. Crowds of people and long queues of calls used to me so nervous that it would start to make it hard to breathe and my thoughts became all consumed with the threat of impending doom—person after person after person until it became impossible to think of anything else. Tonight though, I didn’t freak out and it didn’t become hard for me to breathe. There was a moment when I almost started to freak out though. It was 12:57pm, the time when calls stop coming in, and I had just gotten off a twenty-one-minute call which is bad enough on its own and even worse when it’s immediately followed by a call from a man who yells at you and gets mad at you for being the only person in the call center (little did he know, that was an actual fact and not him being rude). Ordinarily, I would have been freaking out for a long time before that and would have completely broken down at that point, but somehow—with the Lord’s unfailing help—I was able to stay relatively composed and handle the next four calls in a peaceful manner. It was amazing! If I hadn’t been so exhausted from the strain of the night, I probably would have been elated from the joy of being able to say that I made it through night without panicking! I just wanted to write this post as an example of truth that “Daring to Hope” isn’t all that scary after all, and when you put your hope in the right place—in the Lord—you can actually accomplish great personal successes, such as not freaking out when you’re the only person at work when an angry man tries to break you! Anyway, it is now 3:42am in Texas and I am tired, but I still have to leave Whataburger, go make a deposit at the bank, and shower before going to sleep! I guess it’s true what they say, a writer never sleeps!
Brittany Alexandria 