Before I started university I struggled with mental health issues ever since my dad passed away when I was just 12 years old. Depression ruled my life for so many years, different tablets, making doses higher and also trying out therapy; I was not myself on medication, but I was not myself when I was not on medication either.
Self-harm was a thing for me, like it was with a lot of people suffering. When people talk about self-harm they instantly think that you're an attention seeking teenager who was not centre of attention. This is not the case. When I self-harmed, I made up excuses. I would punch walls and run my knuckles down the bare brick wall, I was too scared to actually cause a lot of harm to myself with a blade. I just needed to feel relief because after an incident with a wall, I felt like I was happier like a weight was lifted from my shoulders.
Within my first year of university, I had moved away from home and had to be independent, so I took myself off of my tablets.
How was I going to make friends when I felt like a zombie inside?
Why would anyone want to be friends with the weird girl who fake laughs because she can't remember what happy is?
As soon as I was off my medications and started feeling more normal the better I felt, I felt like I could go my whole life without tablets to help…
That was until depression left, and anxiety moved in.
Anxiety replaced my depression, and panic attacks became a norm for me. I was newly in a relationship and I would get random panic attacks over nothing; one time I was cooking dinner and I got a bit too hot with the oven on and a panic attack started so I had to leave cooking to go sit in the garden for 10 minutes with a drink to calm myself down. I got so used to having panic attacks I knew exactly how to calm myself down.
Anxiety ruled my life for the first two years of university until stressed moved in and anxiety welcomed it.
The third-year at university was the worst for me, I had a million and one assignments to write on top of my dissertation. I felt like my social life was going down the creek. I was dealing with severe family illnesses with grandparents. And my 'friends' seemed so distant from me I did not feel like I had anyone to talk to.
Welcome to my mental break down.
I crashed, I burned, and I was stuck. I was unstable to be away from home but I needed to get away from everything and everyone. I have never felt so unhappy and alone since I was first diagnosed with depression, I was terrified that it was coming back, that something had triggered me to end up back in depression. I felt hopeless, I felt that nobody cared, especially my best friend, I felt alone and that's the one feeling I cannot stand.
How could I feel alone when I lived with loads of people and was in a happy and stable relationship?
-I had so many people around me that I could have spoken to, that I could have opened up to but I physically could not, all I could do was cry.
What I am trying to get at is, when you have a mental health problem and everything changes for you, there is a chance everything will be fine, but there is also a change that everything will not be fine. When I came to university I did not talk to anyone about what could happen to my mental health because no one had told me it could change for better or worse. Within colleges, when talking about the next big step of university, there needs to be some sort of discussion about mental health.
Share This Article
