Just Plain Nutty

The Question

See, I know I'm stressed out. But I can't help but ask myself at times: for what? 

Compared to my parents and my sister, I have no right to be stressed out. My parents are working like slaves for my sister and I, especially dad. My sister was through far worse in her first year: not only were her courses harder, she could not live in residence and her only choice was to commute 3 hours a day. 

In comparison, I cannot help but feel that I have no right to feel stressed. I am lucky. 

And yet, I cannot seem to give back to my parents what they had given me. Although neither of them blamed me for a bad mark on my midterm, for they knew I had tried hard, even a little too hard, I blamed myself. Why can't I give back what I had been given? 

Being the over thinker that I am, I immediately took apart the problem with questions: Am I weak? Am I just overreacting? Is it because of my somewhat sheltered personality? 

I chose the last as my theory.

Urban Dictionary definition of "sheltered": A person who leads this kind of life is one who doesn't get out enough, is still pathetically mind-controlled by their parents and is scared shitless of them. Anything fun is presumed to be evil. Common condition in children of very religious families.

I hope that's not me...? On top of that, it doesn't relate at all to the reason I'm reacting to University with stress. A "sheltered" person, in my point of view, is stressed in their environment because they had not been in contact with anything harsher. There are many things far harsher than University life, but I have (some, thankfully) yet to meet them. 

"Sheltered" people can be spaced in one of two categories: Closed or Open. Closed is more of the Urban Dictionary version, but due to an increasingly open-minded society, I would think they are becoming rare. Being a close-minded shelter would run the risk of insanity nowadays. Therefore, I think I would prefer open, which also makes me very curious of what others have to say about their lives. 

So I decided to post this question on to Yahoo Answers: "What was the saddest/hardest thing that ever happened to you and how did you deal with it?" 

I received some interesting posts, including a grandmother worried for her grandsons due to the influence of a drug addicted mother, a (hopefully) sarcastic user who stepped on a skittle and never forgot the incident after 20 years, and a man who had to give up the "love of his life" - twice. 

The stories out there are endless. I want to know at least a fraction of them. 

I want to know why the homeless ended homeless on the downtown Eastside. 

I want to know how the murderer came to be.

I want to know why the man in the black suit and tie had stopped believing. 

And I want to know why the squirrels at school husk at the peanuts that I am calling peanuts when they are actually acorns. 

What a world out there. So many stories. So many people. 

So much to believe in. 

How exactly did I get from University stress to "sheltered" to the world of diversity that we should appreciate?

Meh.