I woke up this morning from another anxiety dream; I had just finished a semester of college and was waiting with dread to see what my grades were. Of course, the dream also featured my parents heavily, making the tie to real anxiety a little more logical and palpable. Even with that link, it is getting old that my anxiety dreams always seem to center school. I am nearly 40 years old, it’s literally been 16 years since I took a class with a grade. And yet.

School anxiety dreams are weird in one way and make perfect sense in another. They’re weird because, very simply, that’s not how school went for me. Even during my sophomore year of college, the arguable low point of my academic career, I was never so detached from my classes or my exams that I was awaiting report cards in dread. Were my grades worse than I expected that year? Yes. Did they improve the next year when I (gasp) spent more time studying and put in more concerted effort not to fall asleep in class? Also yes. Not knowing what my grades were going to be, forgetting to go to a class for an entire semester, falling irrevocably behind on work because I just never did it…those things show up constantly in my dreams and yet don’t resemble my academic behavior at all.

There is the other anxiety, the more underlying, metaphorical anxiety about school that tracks. I don’t believe I could go back to school. That is to say, if you took me and enrolled me in an engineering program now, at 39, I don’t think I’d do as well as I did in the mid-aughts, and that’s if I could finish at all. Calculus is mostly out of my head. The principles I learned are still things I know how to apply, but the actual equations are entirely gone. As it is, I’m not an engineer in my day job; I do other sorts of math. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure I could probably rock an intro statistics class, but those are muscles I still exercise.

We don’t do school for work. There’s no college major for what I do now, and getting to where I am required learning a vast swathe of knowledge, applying that knowledge with experience, and yeah, slowly forgetting the things that were no longer relevant to my daily life. I didn’t learn how to do the things I do in college, I merely started on that journey. That does mean that now, over 20 years after I started college, I have a very real anxiety that being back in a classroom is something I’d have a lot of trouble doing. I’m not sure if it matters for my life right now, but one part of being an anxious person is contingencies. If everything fell apart tomorrow, what would you do to put it back together? What would you have to learn or what certification would you have to get? I’m getting to the age where that’s becoming more difficult. I also, honestly, don’t know if it’s relevant. I’ve pivoted before, I may very well pivot again. That doesn’t mean I need to go back to college.

And that drives to the rest of my dream’s metaphor. The other part of the dream involved my parents, and that does key into real anxiety in a more primary way. My parents are both getting older, and the last couple of years have been hallmarked by health problems and other new emerging issues, which I am the point person to help with as my brother lives on the other side of the country. So in a way, the dream makes sense; cast my parents opposite the persistent symbol of my anxiety, an incoming college report card.

I’ve been thinking on and off about dream journaling; it’s something I did when I was younger and have tried to resume multiple times in adulthood with little success. When I did consistent dream journaling at age 14 the results were striking; after a couple weeks of journaling I was consistently and vividly remembering dreams every night, and my journal entries showed that level of detail in my recall which lasted longer than before. Dream journaling isn’t an easy habit to build; when you’re starting out it’s especially difficult as you may not remember dreams every night and therefore not be able to build a consistent habit. To make that even worse, waking up with an alarm disrupts dream recall significantly. That’s one reason my dream journaling petered out in high school; when I began freshman year I was waking up much earlier than I needed to in middle school and therefore started waking up every morning with an alarm clock for the first time in my life.

I don’t know if more deliberate dream journaling will change my relationship with anxiety dreams. More than anything else, I’m a bit frustrated that the dreams I remember best are those that evoke an anxious response. I don’t particularly enjoy waking up and, sitting in a bit of dawn light, having to take stock and remind myself that I just came out of a dream and there is no report card incoming. When I was dream journaling, waking up from dreams felt more even handed, even those with some anxiety triggers. Of course, this could be because in adulthood I’m having more anxiety dreams than I did when I was younger. That’s a bit of an unpleasant consideration, but it’s likely true.

It’s frankly a bad time to be working on reducing my anxiety levels. The world is a total mess, my parents aren’t doing super well and I’m working a job that both requires more hours than I’ve worked historically as well as reading the news to stay caught up on policy developments. Stepping back from all the things causing anxiety is harder than it’s been in a good while, and apparently it’s coming through in my dreams. At least I’m not confused or surprised by this? I’d be a lot more worried about my brain if this was all coming from nowhere, but that’s certainly not the case.

The world keeps moving, for better or worse. It is spring now, which means there will be more cycling and (hopefully) an attendant increase in my mental health. I also hope that I can work more on stepping back, taking everything as it comes and not letting things get me down too much. It’s all a lot, but it’s a lot for everyone. So for everyone else who’s feeling the heaviness of the world right now, know that it’s not just you. Things you’d be able to manage in easier times are going to feel bigger, feel heavier, and that just makes sense. I hope you’re able to shoulder your load this week, and lighten your load if you can.