Pressure and the Word “Enough”

By Elise Arreza, 2025-2026 Student Executive Committee Design Manager
May 22nd, 2026

Pressure is something that everyone would experience at some point. Whether it's from wanting to do well on a test, or just the nagging feeling after observing someone who you think is doing way better than you. However, the more clearer version of pressure would be from our peers. But sometimes, those expectations end up piling up a greater pressure coming from yourself.

I usually take pride in the fact that I surround myself with so many ambitious and talented people, but sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming. There’s so much that they could do that I can’t, and sometimes it feels like I’m not working hard enough.

Enough, a word that hurts a lot more than it's supposed to. At first, when it doesn’t matter that much, it just feels like validation. A ‘hey Elise, you’re doing so well!’ Enough always felt like a word that meant ‘you’re almost doing too much! That’s enough.’ Now, it feels like a good compared to a perfect. An achievement that means nothing compared to the many achievements earned by others.. In a world where friends, and acquaintances expect a Masters instead of an Exceeds in STAAR, a 95 instead of a 90, a first chair not a third. Suddenly the sentence ‘yes it's good enough’ suddenly feels like it barely surpasses an expectation.

The first time the pressure hit me was in 7th grade. Towards the beginning of the year, I was a little worried about how I would do. Things were quiet until October, when I began to hear the whispers of “GPA” and “doing well to get into a good college.” In some way, people around me found people who were smart, were better people than someone who was just okay. It was this time when I began to feel insecure, insecure that I wasn’t living up to expectations that I wasn’t even putting on myself. Everywhere I looked, it was like staring at others in a race. In the audience would be my friends, star-studded and basically almost perfect, peering down at me as if I was to do the same. The racers? All people I know, all that looked confident, and when that race began, I would lag behind.

Sometimes, I wonder if it was because I was Asian-American, and when people looked at me, they would automatically think I was smart. Even my other peers of the same race would look at me and assume I was someone who could share answers and be a picture perfect A student. Orchestra had added on to this pressure, since the stereotype in my school was ‘Asians in Orchestra were really good.’ These little things had almost made me lose my mind, and if it weren’t for my actual passion in cello, I would have ended my musical journey right there.

Even so, if it wasn’t peer pressure that was affecting me, it was the pressure that I decided to put on myself. During that year, I had believed for a little while that it was actually my friends that made me feel like I had to achieve something. However, I slowly realized that sometimes it was just all in my head. The way my mind interpreted a look of absolute shock on my friend’s face as a look of disappointment when I meekly said that I got 81% hurt more than the actual look she gave me itself. My mind kept nagging, telling me ‘you just disappointed everyone with your sad scores, you should’ve done better, you should have tried reviewing more.’ Its funny how your brain can always blame someone else but never you.

But in the end, I've realized that I need to start looking at things differently. If I ever want to stop doubting myself, I have to learn that it's all in my head. No one is expecting more of me than myself. I have to learn to challenge the thoughts that twist things to something negative. I know it won’t happen overnight, but nothing meaningful does. I understand now that so much of the pressure comes from my own head. Maybe it means that its something I will learn to manage. Pressure doesn’t have to be the things that hold me, or others like me that hold people back, but something that accelerates me forward. As long as I remember that my worth isn’t defined by anyone else’s expectations, not even myself.