As Seventh-day Adventist Christians, many of us feel like we’re pushed through the system: Adventist education, Adventist church, Adventist corporation. Rinse and repeat. We raise our children to go to Adventist schools and do all of the culturally appropriate “Adventist-ish” things. So, are we Adventist enough? Let’s make an obviously satirical checklist.

I started 2017 with all of these ideas, visions, and goals. Things I had thought about for years have come to fruition over the course of this year. I’ve loved my job as President since the beginning. The meetings, the events, the freedom to be creative and innovative, and even the freedom to fail. There’s been so many moments, however, when I have struggled to get up after something rough happens.

There are three words that have found themselves manifested in my life for the past month or so: Set me free. Lately, I’ve been a bit irritated with myself. I work hard, sleep less, eat sparingly, and work eternally. Here’s my list of occupations, and it’s a long one: I work for my university’s Campus Ministries, I’m a teacher’s assistant for my advisor in my major, I’m an actor that entertains other students for a big production done twice a semester, I’m a senator for my school’s Student Association, I’m an active member of a community of people around the city that want to eradicate race issues in Chattanooga, I sit on multiple committees, I take upwards of fifteen credit hours, and I’m a boyfriend who’s nearly five thousand miles away from his girlfriend. I’m a workaholic to say the least. Here’s the thing about being me: I hold myself to an unrealistic, romantic standard in which I accept nothing but perfection, and anything less than that is a failure and disappointment. It’s imprisonment of the mind, and I, like so many of you, am chained to the walls of my perfectionism. Today, Phil’s Philosophy is self-help, and yes, maybe it’s a little long, but perhaps a little more necessary. Depression is something that scares most people, and I’m not one to put a label on myself, but it is what it is.

Welcome back to Phil’s Philosophies! Today’s blog is a journal excerpt from my time in Cancun, Mexico as a short-term missionary this past summer. Mission work is another one of my philosophies, and maybe it might inspire you to try something similar: be uncomfortable.