I used to think that having anxiety and depression was something shameful and because of that, I would often keep quiet about what I was going through. However, I’ve come to realize that the more I stay silent about my own mental health, the more I feed into the stigmas that society has created about people with anxiety and depression. For the longest time, keeping quiet is what kept me from getting help. In high school, my family would make comments about the way I behaved and just chalk it up to an “angry teen” phase, while in reality, I was suffering from depression and expressing my emotions in the only way I knew how to. When I got to Florida State, I decided that I was going to take charge and make my life better. I thought that if I made it so everything in my life was seemingly perfect then I wouldn’t have a reason to feel depressed. I was obviously wrong. I still felt a loss of control over my feelings. There were still moments of anxiety where I questioned if the people I met secretly hated me or days when I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed and coming to terms with the fact that these were things I couldn’t control was really difficult for me. I remember getting into a fight with my former roommate and just feeling so anxious that I couldn’t eat for days or be in the same room as her and thinking to myself this isn’t how normal people react to conflict.
The very next day I booked an appointment at the Health and Wellness Center where I was diagnosed with depression and severe anxiety. I was prescribed a few different medications and shortly after sent to the University Counseling Center where I was connected with my therapist, Magnolia. I’m the type of person who when asked a lot of questions, easily gets aggravated because it can feel a little invasive at times so getting used to having to answer questions about my feelings was definitely a challenge for me. From then on, I took my medications every day and would go to the counseling center every two weeks to talk about where I was in life, and if I was doing better or worse.
Eventually, the severity of my anxiety and depression definitely subsided but something that I had to come to terms with was that it would never fully go away. Something that I think is really important to understand when you struggle with mental illnesses is that it never fully goes away. There’s no “cure” to anxiety and depression, which is perfectly fine, but society has convinced us that we need to get rid of these parts of ourselves in order to get better. In my opinion, getting better is really just about accepting the fact that you have a mental illness and taking the steps that are necessary to ensure that you have healthy coping mechanisms for the days where you feel down. I would consider myself to be in a much better place than I was a year ago when I first started getting treatment but I still have some bad days where I feel like I’ve made no progress. In the grand scheme of things, dealing with my mental illnesses has made me stronger, kinder and much more independent. So, while it really sucks sometimes, I have my anxiety and depression to thank for the person that I am today.
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