you have to.

I hope you all tuned in on Sunday night/Monday morning when I posted the first All Good Things Reprise. If you didn't catch it, I highly recommend you read the post because, as one faithful reader told me, "your shit gets depressing, girl!" I will be the first to agree, and I sincerely hope you all were able to shake it off. For the sake of honesty and the full impact of this blog and of sharing my struggles as a young adult, I am not inclined to sugar coat much.

But never fear, dear readers, for we are on the upswing! Spring is on its way in (despite the major snow warnings we are being bombarded with after the Great Midwestern Snow Day of 2013), daylight lingers longer, and the warmer winds are just beginning to replace the bitter ones. I hit the bottom of the curve, bumped along it for a bit, but have now managed to get a good foothold to push off faster toward the surface.

Lately I've been focusing on spring cleaning, not of physical stuff but clearing out the clutter in my jam-packed schedule. Some of you may not believe me, given the number of tempting invitations I have turned down in the past couple of weeks, but I promise I am working on it! I'm trying to get more sleep, which means being more disciplined about getting home at a reasonable hour (at least on weeknights) and recognizing that "going to bed" is a long process for me. It involves a lot of winding down, not rushing through my routines.

I'm trying to get to bed earlier, get out of bed faster, be earlier and leave myself more cushion time between point A and point B. I'm trying to be more efficient so I can cruise for 15 minutes here and there, in between the other stuff I have to do.

To be honest, spring cleaning also means sweeping out the clutter in my brain, cutting back on responsibilities and commitments, addressing issues I have with people and situations, taking care of menial tasks so they stop hanging over my head. A week or two ago, I was getting really low on gas but couldn't afford to fill up my tank until the next morning (what did I say about not sugarcoating?!), so I turned off the heat and the radio, and ran the wipers as little as I could get away with. And I found the silence liberating, a relief. There is not much silence or inactivity in my life, and to be honest that's mostly because I'm afraid of it.

But it's becoming increasingly clear to me that I need oasis. I need empty moments from time to time; I need to give myself a break. Last week I had a minor meltdown when I realized I was escaping the chaos of home to go to work, and escaping the chaos of work to go home. There is no solace in this cycle.

For me, a big part of this is awareness. Step one is infinitely harder than steps 2 through 12 combined.

I have been realizing lately the extent of prejudice that is a part of our daily lives. This is partly because I feel forced into silence on many of these topics (in this sense, silence is not liberating). I'm too skinny to talk about weightism and too white to talk about racism. I am a woman, but as we know there is a forced silence in being a woman, too. Maybe silence is normalized on both sides? We'd rather just pretend these issues don't exist. Anyway, the flavor of this week is ageism.

I have heard this word being tossed around, but it has never been tangible to me until this week. I was wondering why I have repeatedly been raked across the coals by one client after another, when my boss will say more or less the same thing to them and they are suddenly satisfied. It occurred to me suddenly this week that it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I am one of those dreaded irresponsible, self-absorbed milennials who have no valid experiences or skills to speak of and would rather spend all our time posting about what we had for lunch on Facebook than get any work done.

But here's the thing: I am one of the most responsible people I know, in any age bracket. I take accountability seriously, and I take the quality of my work seriously. I take the way I treat people seriously, and while I don't hit the mark every single time on every single task, I take getting better at it really seriously.

I will admit that I do post about what I had for lunch and other minutiae on this blog, and I'm not ashamed about it because lunch is real life and it's actually a lot more stressful than you think it is when your mom makes you sandwiches (or at least buys the deli meat and peanut butter) or it's lumped into your tuition under the subheading: Room & Board.

Anyway, the important thing clients (and other people) should know about me is that I am great at what I do, and I am just one member of an unbelievably smart, talented team. That's something we milennials know about: group work. Pretty sure I had one class, if that, in college that didn't involve a group project of some kind.

So this epiphany to me was empowering. And this, coupled with a few other small victories, successful mental cobweb-clearing, and a series of conversations, I turned into fuel to power some big changes in my attitude and my self-presentation at work and in my personal relationships. I've got skills, but no one will take me at my word if there's no conviction behind it. I will have to work harder to be taken seriously from time to time, both because I am young and because I am a woman.

There are some uncomfortable truths I am just going to have to accept:

• I will face discrimination.
• ...And, yes, I will discriminate from time to time, even though I try so, so hard not to.
• Animals are messy and demanding and I live with three of them. Too bad.
• My car is getting old and sometimes it needs a little more TLC than I am prepared to give.
• I have horrible eyesight.
• People aren't always nice to each other.
• There are not enough hours in the day.
• This is by no means an exhaustive list. In fact, I charge you to find a list that is truly exhaustive.

So my goal is to continually get better at living with these truths -- yes, and mitigating them as much as I can, but with the understanding that these things take time. I am so often guilty of expecting too much of myself, and that only makes the weight feel heavier. So what can I do?

One day last week my boss was joking around and instead of laughing I made some kind of skeptical face.

"It's a joke!" he said. "You're supposed to laugh!"

"I miss your laugh," my supervisor chimed in. "You used to laugh all the time." (It's true; I did, and they all used to try for it. They called it "gracious.")

"I don't have time to laugh these days," I said, trying to brush it off and get back to the endless checklist on my desk. "There's too much to do."

"Make time," boss-man said. "You gotta have time to laugh. You have to."

When he said this I felt guilty. I used to tell my friends in college, "If I'm ever start dating someone and stop laughing, get me out of there stat." I have always judged my general state of being by laughter, and I think it's cyclical: laughter is both an indicator and a perpetuator of happiness.

I have to laugh; I can't afford not to.