Navigating Freshman Year with Mental Illness

Photo from Emory Dark Arts' Dear Emory Project. TW: the good, bad, and ugliness of illness.

When I began college last August, my dorm’s door dec proudly displayed my home of Memphis, Tennessee. Though I am a proud product of the Bluff City, I’ve come to confront my dual citizenship between two worlds, public and private. The first has been the realm of scholar, performer, captain, mentor, featured artist, student ambassador, gold medalist, valedictorian, the quirky poet and painter smiling her way from overachiever to undergraduate. My second home has been that of constant fear, sporadic sleep, catastrophizing, raw-eyed crying, panic attacks, procrastination, headaches, starving, hyperventilating, binging, skin-deep incisions, seasonal sadness, inner bullies, hopeless emptiness, guilt and hiding. Though at times I reside in each, I am not the agent who coordinates my travel arrangements between the two.

No matter my locale, I've always questioned whether I ever deserved to be so upset. Why was I suffering so much despite such a loving support system of family and friends? Why suffer with more than enough resources to keep me surviving and thriving? When life is so short, why suffer from self-induced illness at all? It wasn’t until after I began treatment that I understood this interrogation as one of the key tactics of mental illness. It’s like a virus trying to trick the immune system into killing its own antibodies. This kind of sickness kept me questioning myself while it continued to proliferate within, untouched by treatment or intervention.

It was here that I first learned to rationalize my self-hate. I figured just an ounce is fine; it’s natural and nontoxic at low doses. It’s motivation not to become stagnant for someone like me, someone determined to succeed and progress. If I’m always unsatisfied with the way I am, then I will always be driven to work toward improving my current condition. But on my healthier travel days, I could clearly see the logic of Diminishing Returns: at a certain point, hating who you are becomes counterproductive. After a while, it seemed I would always fall short, never be enough. No matter how much I was driven to accomplish, there was always room for self-hate at the end of the day. So why continue trying?

Only in therapy did I begin to unravel this ticker tape of irrational thoughts. Counseling was like MasterClass: Me when in-home treatment every school break wasn’t enough. I learned so much and started caring for myself in ways I’d lost hope for, so long ago. This nurturing was exactly what I needed. My inner activist had been fighting so hard to love myself amid a system that profits when I don’t. But I realized my self-hate reached deeper than what I or anyone else could see. It was the ugliest of what lay within that took me nearly a lifetime to begin loving. About halfway through the school year, though, my counseling ended. My school’s healthcare system deems students healthy “enough” to stop treatment based in part by supply and demand, and my supply had run dry. Decidedly unworthy of burdening my parents with bills from a new doctor's treatment, I commenced a mission for my own remedies during my second semester of "independence."

I immersed myself in extracurriculars and spent more time outside of my head, balancing between involved and overwhelmed. Volunteering gave me a rush of positivity and diverted my focus from the very "privileged" face of my suffering. I relished the distraction of surrounding myself with friends, mastering the art of hiding my tears in public. I aligned myself with so many sources of help—ranging from a task force of black ambassadors to a mental health à les memes support group. Often my mind was so occupied that, by day’s end, I had no time to tend to the truth clawing its escape from within.

But I soon traded the unsustainable, fake-it-‘til-you-make-it mask crafted from the glow of screens for the immense, honest spotlight of a Mental Health Advocate for Emory Dark Arts. Dark Arts showed me that my diagnoses made me not broken, but wholly human. That power lies in the shared, first-year search for validation, empathy, and compassion. That whether I was one of the people out there starving for lack of food or someone starving herself because my inner shame urged me on, I shouldn’t feel guilty; that how we suffer does not deny our need for support. My amazing people embraced and loved me to the point of self-acceptance, reassuring us all that “it’s okay not to be okay.”

Despite this fact, I was fighting to be as okay as I could. I rarely missed a Sunday worship service, constantly shunning the “'get right' with God” defense for my sickness, a mindset rampant in my bible belt birthplace. Accompagné par la dance class, I exercised so often I sometimes pushed painful shin splints, just for an endorphin-induced emotional relief that outpaced any ache for physical comfort. Having run myself to the brink of an asthma attack one night, I could only think how thankful I was to be alive (with inhaler in hand) and a little less of an anxious mess. My newfound veganism garnered rabbit-themed jokes from my friends, but with the help of internet hype I decided being a “cured” herbivore was better than being a depressed anything else. Yet a strict diet's danger is that it requires close control over every bit of food consumed, blurring the line between short-order and disorder. Most days, though, I evaded over- or under-eating at the whim of my neurochemistry—almost everything except chocolate, my problematic yet delicious quick fix for anxiety. As a part-time vegan and full-time vegetarian runner/dancer/worrier, I was forced to confront how my ever-toxic body image still worsened my symptoms. At the end of each day, I was exhausted from everything extra I was doing, plus the after-party of worrying that often followed. But still I tried more.

As a creative, I've always embraced art as a powerful remedy. Beyond my performances with Dark Arts, I flourished in weekly art sessions, made readings and showcases my soul food, and sought refuge in the music like medicine flooding my ears until they nearly ached. Writing, however, proved to be both a source of, and a hindrance to, a lot of my healing. My academic pursuit of writing means nearly everything I create is tied to external approval from professors, peers, or potential publishers. Being an artist is central to my identity, so something as “simple” as a single article is still stitched to my sense of self-worth. I’m often so self-conscious that I long to erase every mark made or backspace every word put to page the instant it escapes my mind. It’s a feeling kind of like cringing at microphone feedback of your own voice, but worse—this suppressive echo rattles my constant thoughts. On healthier days, I’m at peace to exist in relative silence, but the crash of relapse still resonates somewhere in a distant synapse.

No matter how much I try to rework and rewrite my story, it will somehow remain problematic and imperfect. One of my most personal, this blog post was a struggle to write. I struggled speaking on a topic treated with such stigma by media and public discussion, forever tied to references of “lone wolves” in school shootings or "welfare queens" claiming disability benefits. It was a struggle, but nothing like navigating my first year of college through the contagion of depression, the myopia of anxiety, or the lingering fever of grief. Of course, this is only a two-semester snapshot capturing my ongoing experience living with mental illness, but I remain grateful for the courage to speak out and emerge stronger each day. I’m no authority on the subject, though I hope my scars can help heal someone else out there hurting.