That title should have (so far) in parenthesis after it. I will always be in my mental health journey.

Anyway, let’s rewind to a bit closer to the beginning of it though. I’ve had anxiety since I was very little. One of the youngest instances I remember it blatantly was in 3rd grade when I got so freaked out to take an SOL I physically got sick & ended up having to go home. Now that I know them, the signs for anxiety have been there for a long time. Around the ages of 17-18, I believe I had what I now recognize as depressive episodes. I am not positive if it was present earlier. There are just some parts of my childhood I straight up do not remember. It’s big periods of time & events that were big enough that I should remember, but I do not. So trying to decipher, within the parts where I apparently disassociated, a timeline of things is does get a tricky for me.

I didn’t remotely understand any of these things until college though. I didn’t fully know what anxiety or depression was before then or the different ways they present themselves in different people. I accepted I most likely had both my sophomore year of college when the panic attacks started & the periods of numbness got more intense. I held out from going to the doctor though – just figured I had it & tried to keep going. In my family going to the doctor was not a thing unless you’re seriously injured.

1. We didn’t have insurance so didn’t always have the money.

And 2. My parents were very distrustful of doctors and medication so, in my head, the expense was not worth it & I wasn’t going to be on meds anyway.

That meant I almost failed out of college. HA. Wow. That’s a big one to finally confess to the public. No one really knew the full extent, but I think at one point my semester gpa was below a 1.8. My major was not a walk in the park, I know that, but there were periods of time I just couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t make it to class often and it really wasn’t always just due to messing around with my friends.

By junior year, I was already on track to have to take a 5th year and could only fail a certain class once more (which I did) and be allowed to retake it. So there I was with one more fucking shot. This was almost exactly around the time my two-weeks-into-dating boyfriend drove me to go pick out Ivy. So cliché of me: I met lover boy, got Ivy, and got my damn shit together for a second. Both helped tremendously with my mental health though so I got off academic probation & even ended up being on the deans list the next two semesters. I was doing better – great even!

And then my dad died. To this day I don’t know how I managed to push through enough to graduate that semester & get a job, but it’s single-handedly some of the moments in my life I’m most proud of myself. It was probably a combination of disassociating and genuinely knowing I had this single shot left to make it count. But I did it & I ended up in Raleigh.

In Raleigh, the panic and anxiety attacks started up again. The depressive episodes reached a new low. I knew I was grieving so it made sense, but I was having such a hard time and it interfered with my job so much that I decided maybe I do need help. So, at 23 years old, I got formally diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and persistent depressive disorder.

Accepting to take meds and go to therapy took me a longer while still (and is a whole other story), but I’m thankful I did it. Fast forward to now, after being in therapy for almost 3 years, I can say a lot of the pieces are starting to fit together. I fully recognize now every step has made my quality of life better. It will always be an ongoing process, but I’m much better equipped now. Despite my diagnosis recently changing, I feel like I’m really starting to find what fits &, even with all the chaos in the world, that’s a real peaceful feeling.