I am not going to lie, during the entire room selection process last weekend I was irritated.

Residence Life might have made extra efforts to make room selection as stress-free as possible, but once my first choice for housing was taken, I found myself stressed and upset. I couldn’t help but think how there will be another year where I don’t get my first choice in housing. It cycled through my head over and over and I became angry just thinking about it. Yet again, I felt like I was being ripped off by residence life. At the time, nothing would make me happy, even though I won a free fried pickle voucher for Jefferson’s (well, my roommate won it and gave it to me) and my future room is going to be bigger than the other rooms in my hall. I was still mad.  When I went back to my dorm and tried to study for my chemistry test, I was still upset and then I tried to go to sleep that night I was even more upset. It seemed that my entire night was ruined.

I knew in order to get a good nights rest I needed to calm down, because who likes to go to sleep angry? While I could use this as a chance to say that I eventually decided that I should just be grateful that I live in a first-world country and have a roof over my head, that is not what lifted my mood.

A famous quote, which is sometimes attributed to Buddha, says, “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”  This quote describes exactly what I was doing. What was keeping me upset long after I had been assigned a room was nothing that Residence Life did or didn’t do but rather, it was by my own decision in staying angry anyway.

Growing up, I was taught that being angry could be a good thing because righteous anger can give the fuel you need to change some things. Unfortunately, as much as I wanted it to be, this was not one of those cases. In fact, being angry in the first place was never going to get me the room of my dreams. Eventually, I had to accept that I could not change my room assignment and by doing this, I was able to calm down.

In hindsight it sounds silly, but I find that people often get upset about things that they cannot change and this type of anger usually only ends up hurting the person in the long run. It is almost natural to be angry when we cannot change something that upsets us and it is really difficult to choose to pick another emotion that doesn’t involve anger. While I don’t claim to hold the key to happiness or an idea to make room selection less stressful (though free TVs would be cool), I have found that when I can identify situations that cannot be changed and realize that the only person who can decide if I am angry is me, then events that cause frustration can become less stressful and more manageable.