Looking Back

Okay, I’m going to start this post off by saying that it’s been a while. It’s been like five months, even though I said it’d be a week before my next post. Unfortunately, life got the best of me this semester and my time and motivation to write all but disappeared.

The good news is, I had a fun and relaxing and rejuvenating winter break. I spent a lot of time with family and friends and enjoyed my time off to reset and revamp before I head into this next semester. I ate good food and had good conversations and slept way more than my mom really liked. And now I’m sitting in JFK airport with four hours left before my flight to London leaves (at which point I wait another 6 hours before I leave for Florence).

Originally I was going to make this post and my next all one. But I feel like this post is too important to be combined with anything so it will stand alone and I’ll be posting twice today. So, before I start on my excitement about these upcoming four months, I wanted to discuss last semester. During those four months, which were simultaneously the longest and shortest of my life, I was taking 17 credit hours of classes packed with projects and assignments, while also working 25-30 hours a week and attempting to maintain a social life that felt like it was in shambles.

In fact, on some days, especially the weekends when I had no structured responsibilities, I was so tired and depressed that I could barely get myself out of bed in the mornings, I had no motivation to walk to the dining hall to eat, and it would take me hours to fall asleep at night. I woke up every day feeling more exhausted than the last and each week felt like a never ending cycle of work, school, depression, work school, depression. I wanted to be done and home, the safety of my childhood bed. Just writing about the feeling makes my head hurt and the constant tiredness I’d feel behind my eyes return.

I’m not writing about this to get pity or to scare anyone. I’m writing about this because I heard from so many people who were experiencing the same thing and it needs to be talked about. I’ve always been very open about my mental health, but for some, they struggle to talk about it or open up; others don’t even know that’s what they are struggling with. Too many times I hear that people feel alone in that struggle. When I speak about my anxiety and depression, I often hear, “I thought I was the only one.”

It’s so important for us to have these conversations. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to be struggling. It’s okay to feel the way a lot of us do. It’s also okay to ask for help, to seek out support, to talk to people who can teach you the best ways to cope with what you’re feeling, even to put a name to it; I can promise, putting a name to it makes it so much easier, it gives you something real to fight back against. Once it has a name, it has a face and you can look it right in the eye and tell it that it can’t define you, that it won’t define you.

If you are going through a hard time or anything that I’ve just said feels like something that you connect with or can relate to, please don’t hesitate to talk to someone. Talk to your best friend, your partner, your parents, your siblings, your teacher, your co-worker, me; anyone you feel you can trust or are comfortable with. And please, don’t let the conversation stop there. Go further: talk to a counselor or a psychiatrist, then keep talking. Let others hear your story. No one should feel like they are alone in this because I can promise, they aren’t. You aren’t.