Weather used to make me anxious.

Extremely anxious.

Growing up on the East Coast, I have undergone more blizzards, ice storms, death-defying drives to school, broken tree limbs over roofs, and week-long power outages than I ever really signed up for, and over time, those experiences turned me into a complainer. A loud one.

Every year, as soon as winter touched down, I would begin to pout. And then moan. And then compulsively check the Weather Channel, hoping against hope that maybe the predictions had changed overnight, and those 13 inches of snow would just miss us. I would routinely get sad 24 hours before a big storm, and downright miserable if said storm occurred in the early spring months. I hated everything about winter, but lacking any real reasons to move south, I would just sit it out and let my mood darken for months on end.

At 10 years old you could probably find me sitting on my bed, mesmerized by the latest NSYNC album, while playing the tracks on loop and dancing in front of the mirror. At 15 years old, I’m already immersed in the high school scene, but I’ll be the first to admit that friends and I would go to the local elementary school playground from time to time and ride the swings. At 20 years old, I’m getting closer to graduating college and entering ‘the real world,’ and life keeps on happening. I’m now turning 22, and it’s safe to say that life isn’t as carefree as it once was.

Innocence does get lost along the way, which is a natural consequence of undergoing various experiences that are encountered along the journey — perhaps grief from an illness, family conflict, loss, or a broken heart, just to cite a few of life’s curveballs. Everyone has a story and everyone has a past. Not everyone, however, copes with life’s pain in the same fashion.

Ah, the time of year when political news is everywhere.

The 2012 presidential election looms, and potential candidates travel the country looking for support week after week. It’s a time for thinking about where our country has been and where it should go. It’s a time when people get together and discuss the environment, health care, and unemployment. It’s a time when couples sit down and talk warmly about their hopes for the country and fill envelopes for the party they both are fervent members of.

Sounds sweet, doesn’t it? But I’m not writing about these happily politically aligned people, because they’ll agree with each other that they have no need to read this.

I’m writing about the couples who, when they talk politics, argue, yell, post competing political statements on their lawn, and slam the door on any poor fool who happens to be distributing the ‘wrong’ campaign flyer. If this is you, keep reading. If not, keep reading anyway. You’ll eventually argue with your partner about something, right?

Some people will see anything they want to see in any particular movement or demonstration. Movements like Occupy Wall Street are like a Rorschach Inkblot Test — although it’s just ink on a piece of paper, you can see the future and the past in every blot.

Psychologist and psychoanalyst Todd Essig sees what he wants to see in the movement. When contrasting it with the Tea Party, he idealizes the motivations and focus of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, as though they were all joined together in a common cause (other than the cause to agitate for change, something President Obama actually started more than 4 years ago).

What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is to understand how people who have such a deep understanding of psychology and insight can’t see how they turn such demonstrations into their own personal Rorschach test.

If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.

Someone once told me that every romantic relationship in our lives will fail until one doesn’t. It sounds harsh, and perhaps a little narrow-minded (can we really succeed or fail in love?), but there is truth to it. Most of us, especially those of us under 25, will enter into relationships that will someday end.

There’s something about going through the end of a relationship in college that tends to make everything more intense. Maybe it’s the added stress of keeping up with schoolwork when all you want to do is curl up into a ball or go for a long walk that lasts all day. Maybe it’s the task of telling tons of people who used to know you as “together” that you’re no longer together. Or maybe it’s just because at such a young age, we haven’t had much practice in the art of dealing with a broken heart. Whatever the case, the end of young love (or even young infatuation) is not easy. In fact, it can be downright hellish.

But there are ways to survive it.

And then, grow from it.

If you’re anything like me, you’re easily overwhelmed by spring cleaning, deciding on a new layout for your living room, and organizing your bedroom closet. (Welcome to the wonderful world of anxiety disorders.)

So, when it comes time to up the ante and move to a new house or apartment, the word “overwhelmed,” then, is reduced to a gigantic understatement. Your heart palpitates at the thought of cardboard boxes. You get lightheaded just thinking about all the nooks and crannies that are crammed with your stuff. Your skin gets clammy as you weakly try to formulate a plan of attack.

Instead of trying to do everything at once, break down the process into digestible steps.

“We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world,” wrote Helen Keller.

How I wish she were wrong.

Disappointments leave us with the unpleasant task of squashing, crushing, and pinching lemons to extract any and all juice.

Here, then, are a few of my techniques to turn sour into sweet, to try my best to overcome disappointment.

1. Throw away the evidence

Albert Einstein failed his college entrance exam. Walt Disney was fired from his first media job. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Get it?

[If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.]

I didn’t gain the Freshman 15 — I gained the College 15 — an increase in pounds over the course of 4 pretty stressful, not particularly healthy years. And while some people might not think 15 pounds is a big deal, when you’re 5 feet 2 inches, yeah — it’s noticeable.

I gained this weight without being a big partier (I have this thing against crowded rooms that smell like barf) and still going to the gym in a fairly regular way. So what the heck happened? A little something called: stress-induced emotional eating.

6:05 am: You lie awake in your tiny bed, underneath the salmon covers, your neck sore from sleeping on one pillow (you asked for another but you’ll need a doctor’s order to have more than one.) Your sleep medicine has worn off and you are now once again a prisoner to your insomnia.

All there is to do now is listen to your roommate snore and mutter to herself in her sleep and the sounds of the nurses talking and phones ringing at the nurses station. You remember a Seroquel-induced nightmare you had previously in the night in which you were trapped in a house that was filling with water, drowning and gasping for air. You make a mental note to mention the dream to your doctor later on.

7:00 am: Morning checks. A tech bangs on your door just as you have started to drift off into a sweet sleep again and informs you that you must be up for breakfast in thirty minutes. You incoherently moan something that resembles an “OK,” roll over and close your eyes again.

[If I Could Go Back is a series of articles that center around the college experience. Hindsight is 20/20, and sometimes the best advice we could ever give stems from experiences in our past that make us cringe just the tiniest bit.]

“If I could do it all over again, I’d major in Education.”

“Oh, me too. Either that or Business.”

“I should have majored in Economics. At least then I’d have a real job.”

These are not the words of slackers or lazy, “Generation Me” complainers. Nor is this a made up conversation invented by a conglomerate of strict parents hoping their children will study something safe in college. This dialogue was actually spoken, by real twenty-somethings, all of whom worked hard for good grades and big fellowships, sometime last week.

During a short vacation back to my hometown, I met up with a bunch of old friends. As we all got caught up with each other’s lives, it became shriekingly apparent that there was a trend among the entire group: we all wished we had been more practical in college.

“Three is a crowd,” my husband told me when I shyly brought up the question of whether we should have more children.

Maybe it was the complicated nature of the question or just the wrong timing (dinner), but we managed to get into a long discussion that culminated in an argument. An hour overdue, banana bread in the oven interrupted us with its burnt smell.

I don’t even know if I want to have more children, but I have been plagued by the question the last few months. We have two.

They are at the age where I can forget about buying mountains of diapers, carrying ten pounds of baby paraphernalia anywhere I go and performing the never-ending gymnastics of helping my kids with every move they make. I am finally becoming just a tad more relaxed, relearning the joy of adult company, uninterrupted conversation and eating meals using both of my hands. After years of being homebound, we’ve taken some fun trips and vacations.

Idiots.

The world is full of them. How hard it is for us, non-idiots, to put up with them. But to get our jobs done, our kids fed, and our pets groomed, we must deal with them.

Idiots come in many shapes, forms, and types, but the ones that frustrate me the most are those who don’t believe in any form of mental illness. These creatures maintain that all mood disorders are cute, creative stories crafted by persons who enjoy obsessing, ruminating, and crying their eyes out… a wealthy bunch who can’t think of anything better to do than come up with a make-believe tale about a few neurons wandering around the limbic system afraid to ask for directions, just like Moses.

We must tune out the idiots to achieve any kind of sanity or serenity. But how? Here are four ways that have worked for me.