One day during October of my second year, I was sitting in my bed, struggling to breathe. I had lined my wall with sticky notes in an attempt to organize my thoughts about God. All I wanted was to make sense of the life I was living, to understand what exactly I believed in and how exactly the world worked. I was suddenly hit with the impossibility of understanding something so much bigger than my tiny life, and I lost my breath. I had been feeling swamped in my jumbled thoughts for weeks.
At first, I thought maybe I was going through a “quarter life crisis,” but on that night, I realized I was dealing with something much bigger. I didn’t want to live inside of my mind anymore; I was held hostage by my thoughts and I wasn’t sure I could wake up and go on living at all. I hid under my covers and eventually fell asleep — exhausted, lonely and confused.
For a while, I found it hard to explain to anyone how I was feeling. I didn’t know what was going on or what was wrong with me. I would hide in my room most nights, attempting to isolate myself from the overwhelming culture of U.Va. But as I hid, my friendships faded and my anxiety dug itself an even bigger hole. I began to convince myself no one cared, and I started to wonder whether or not I cared anymore.
Finally, I was sitting with a dear friend in Grit Coffee, formerly Para, one November morning and I burst — I told her everything. It was such a relief to be listened to and, even more, to be understood. She helped me see through a loving lens how deeply I had been suffering — not only in those past few weeks, but throughout my entire life. When I was younger, I was a huge germaphobe. I refused to go into gas stations or touch the doors of public bathrooms. When my mom was late getting home from work, I would pace back and forth in our upstairs hallway, convinced she had been killed in a car accident. And just a few months ago, I had an irrational fear that I had contracted a brain-eating amoeba and would be dead in a few days.
It sounds crazy, I know. Even now, I feel embarrassed by what I’ve been through and I’ll still hide in my room from time to time when I’m trapped in my thoughts. It’s hard to be honest about mental illness because there’s no external evidence — no fever, no throwing up, no rashes or chills. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real and I’ll tell myself I should just be stronger. But the truth is, I have anxiety. I always have and I always will.
This past week, I woke up and felt my anxiety sweep in. I had class that afternoon and needed to finish the reading, but I worried that if I sat still all day, staring at my computer screen, I would spiral into a worse state. So I emailed my professor, explaining that I didn’t feel well and wouldn’t be able to make it to class. It took me 45 minutes to send that email. I felt so guilty because nothing was physically wrong with me and, from the outside, I seemed perfectly healthy. Then I remembered all of those cartoons people had been sharing on Facebook — the ones highlighting how we treat physical illness so differently than mental illness — and I realized that through my fear of missing class, I was perpetuating those stereotypes.
Our culture makes it so scary to be vulnerable about mental illness, yet ironically, it’s only when we’re honest with ourselves that we are able to get help. Talking to my friend, explaining my anxiety to my parents, finding a therapist, missing class last week — each of those moments were choices to be open with my imperfections and accept that I’m not always in control.
Sometimes I worry that at U.Va., we only care about winners when in fact we are all losers from time to time. Imagine, instead, if we lived in a world where we could admit our mental illnesses, our flaws, our fears, our screw-ups as easily as we can say, “I’m sick” when we have the flu. A world where we’re far from perfect and we love each other anyways.
Peyton’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at p.williams@cavalierdaily.com.
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