I won't sit here and lie to everyone, I'm struggling with things at the moment and there is a part of me that really hates admitting that. It doesn't even feel like I have a good reason to be struggling and I think that's the thing that is really annoying me. I know I am being too harsh on myself and should just be ok with the fact life feels hard at the moment but it would also be incredibly stupid to sit here and not admit the fact I am being harsh on myself and likely making things worse in my head. The other times that I have struggled with my mental health and my anxiety I felt like I had a really good reason, whether that was facing abuse from college tutors or simply being ridiculously isolated and living in London during the pandemic, there was some bigger part of the my situation that was obviously negatively impacting my mental health. And I know there isn’t a big thing impacting my mental health at this present moment in time, it’s a lot of small things.
And there is a part of me as I'm sitting here writing this to you, that is aware how stupid it sounds to be like “oh my mental health needs to have a serious reason why it's playing up”, because that's so contradictory to what I say online. Mental health doesn’t need to have a reason, it can simply just happen out of nowhere and that’s as valid as surviving abuse and dealing with the mental fallout afterwards. The message that mental health has to have a reason behind it, like you have to be dealing with something serious going on, implies that the times where I'm struggling or someone else is struggling and it's due to a lot of small things piling up, that maybe that isn't isn't valid or isn't a correct way of having an experience with poor mental health. But I think it's important to talk about the small things piling up because sometimes the small things are just as overwhelming as one great big thing that someone is facing and I'm having to learn to be okay with these small things.
There is also a part for me as I write this that feels guilty for struggling and I know that I shouldn't but I do. I look at what 16 year old me went through and how much she managed to survive and just how strong she was and I look at what I am dealing with at the moment and go “well that's nothing compared to what I was dealing with at 16, why am I struggling?”. And I think that's because I've adapted. I've found a place in my life now where I am safe and I'm stable as a baseline. I wasn’t when I was 16, my baseline was instability, severe anxiety and an incredible amount of mental distress. That is not my baseline now but yet to be completely honest I still feel guilty for struggling as if admitting the fact I'm struggling somehow minimises the other things that I faced in my life.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m currently at risk of failing my entire MASc course due to a 15 credit module. And this is the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak. This entire year has been wonderful but exhausting. I’ve worked myself to the bone with every assessment, every essay, every class and been dealing with court cases and additional sources of stress outside of the baseline stress of being in academia. Don’t get me wrong, I love academia but the moments where shit hits the fan, it seems to really fall apart for me. And I’ve faced more rejections for jobs I really wanted in the last 7 months than ever before and have been dealing with financial insecurities as a result. It’s been stressful. But it was manageable until now because the workload had dipped down and 90% of my coursework was done. I just had the dissertation to focus on and a lot of lovely things planned with friends and tutors alike. I’d built up to this moment knowing I could sit back and relax, focus on my awesome dissertation project and give that write up my entire focus and be able to enjoy it. I’m no longer stressed about income, due to an incredible offer to house sit from someone in my support system. So I am set to be in London to finish this course with my friends until September and not have to worry about finances bar paying for food and transport. Plus I get to look after someone else’s house plants and allotment, which is honestly going to be such a mood! The job rejections have stopped but that’s because I’ve stopped applying to everything and am trying to get part time work as an activities coordinator in a care home to pay my bills and be able to then branch out into research and other freelance work without the worries of income. But then I failed the module and suddenly my plans for a fun summer of writing one thing, focusing all my efforts on a 15 thousand word essay and making it the best damn thing I have ever written, basically blew up.
And so despite the awesome support system, my friends and tutors rallying around me about this module and trying to fight the battle of getting it remarked and a lack of financial worries, I am struggling with my mental health (likely due to stress). This past week has tested my ability to function to its limits, I have cried myself to sleep, had more panic attacks, forgotten to eat and been emotionally exhausted/burnt out more times this week than the last 3 months of uni. And I want nothing more than to make it all go away, I almost don't care how, I just want to go back in time and make the essay I failed on better. Despite knowing it was the best I could do with the 6 other assignments I also was working on at that time and within the time constraints I had. But knowing this could have been prevented if I had done better, it's eating me alive. I'm feeling incredibly rejection sensitive, ashamed, shy and am starting to doubt my abilities to write academic things a little more than normal. I can't even focus on the dissertation write up because somehow the fear of screwing that up has become so paralysing I'd rather not risk it. And thus the small things have become the sole focus of my life. One little module, 15 credits of something that will mean nothing to people other than me, has wiped my mental reserves of strength. They really do add up quickly eh?
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