Upon my junior year of college, I hit what I would call “rock bottom.”
In my junior year, during my spring semester, life started to weigh on my emotions. I often felt drained and unmotivated. I’ve never been one to self-diagnose, but I knew there was a problem.
I didn’t feel like myself. It felt as if everything around me was losing meaning and I was suffocating without help. It felt like my lungs were without air and nothing would be able to fill them again. No one noticed. I felt as if I was a shell of myself and no one even caught on to the fact that I was changing. I was able to get through it and I just kept it pushing.
It never occurred to me that I would feel like that again. This year has been challenging for me to say the least. I had such high hopes for this semester. It was my junior year. Junior year is supposed to be one of your “easier” years in college (so they said.)
Spring semester started off well. I was making new friends, I had a job, I was taking leadership roles and everything seemed great. One day, it felt as if suddenly, nothing was okay. I remember, it was about 3 PM after mid-terms and I just felt like I was crashing. I didn’t know what the issue was. Whether it was my lack of sleep or the fact that I never had a break. My body went into a panic and I went into survival mode. I was avoiding social interactions, I was always crying, I was ignoring phone calls and many other things I enjoyed doing. On top of being in this funk, I lost a loved one.
During my week of being distraught, I had no choice but to go to class. My Statistics professor just looked at me and it was like she was actually seeing me. It was like she just knew and understood my funk without even asking. That was really all it took before I broke down.
I was avoiding my own feelings for the goal of completing my semester. All semester I was going full force. I was going to work, going to class and participating in my organizations. I was piling loads of work and responsibilities on myself while making it a new norm for me. I was finally crashing. I did not take time for myself and give myself time to breathe.
I feel like this is all too common in our generation. Take care of yourself. Not only physically, but mentally. Your mental health is important. Not one part of you is more important than the other. It is okay to fall back on responsibilities when you feel like you’re at your wit’s end. It is okay to take a mental health day to cater to yourself and your anxiety. Pay attention to the signs, but also pay attention to your friends. Some people are in the midst of crashing and don’t even know.
I cannot stress how important it is to find a healthy balance for yourself.