Mental health in college

College is hard. It's a lot harder with a disability, especially one that a lot of people like to pretend doesn't count.

I've struggled with a generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder for years. Sure, that's been a challenge for what feels like my entire life, but I was never willing to call it a disability. At least, I wasn't until about a year ago.

It took a lot of time to accept the way my symptoms affected my life when they got bad. I could deal with my level of normal anxiety and emptiness, but there were days I couldn't help but hyperventilate if I started to get ready for class. There were nights I couldn't sleep, so I stayed awake for full days at a time. There were mornings I couldn't help but double over in pain as the nausea clung to my stomach and I couldn't handle the smell of food.

Those worsened symptoms didn't happen often, so I let it go. I waited it out. I did what I could to get through it, and I got back to my life.

Eventually, it didn't work that way anymore. After almost a decade of first dealing with symptoms for the mental health disorders I was officially diagnosed with about seven years ago, the dam finally broke.

I hit a wall of so many triggers that I didn't want to leave my room. My body wouldn't let me. The bad days now look like weeks, and they don't involve leaving my dorm room unless I absolutely have to. I can't sit in class. I can't focus on my homework. Writing assignments I'm supposed to be doing turn into poetry, letters to my younger self, letters to my current self, and things like this. I'm a creative writing and journalism major, so sometimes, that's okay. Usually, though, it's not.

I have extra challenges that other students don't have. I'm not skipping out on class because I don't care. I'm so worried about running into someone who triggers my anxiety attacks if I go outside that I'm curled up in bed crying about not making it to the workshop day for my own story. I'm fatigued all day from the mental energy it takes to get myself out of bed and shower. It's exhausting.

I'm not avoiding assignments because I don't want to do them. I'm not procrastinating, not really. I can't even convince myself to eat a real meal half the time, and the executive disfunction for assignments is a lot worse even though I really want to be doing them. I love my majors. I love school. I always have. But if I can't even manage to eat anything but popcorn in a day, how can I possibly focus long enough to read the syllabus for assignment details? (I do better on assignments with the instructions listed on the submission page.)

Mandatory attendance is killing me lately. Every time I start to do better and go back to class, I get another major trigger that puts me right back at square one, and I'm torn between taking time off to focus on my mental health for a semester and knowing that if I do that, I'll just get worse and never come back.

I asked for accommodations this year. It's my senior year, but I finally did it. They don't do much because attendance is half the course for all of my classes, and I'm usually too exhausted to remember to email my professors about extensions when I need them. My cat lives with me now, so at least I'm able to ground myself to sleep eventually. A 4 a.m. bedtime is better than 3 p.m. the next day, right?

I'm living on the idea that anything worth doing is worth doing poorly because I'm meeting myself where I am instead of tearing myself apart more. I wish I could advocate for myself better. I wish I could communicate this well to my professors what I'm going through. It's never this easy, though.

It took reaching a new low, starting medications, attempting talk therapy, realizing talk therapy was not what I personally needed, learning coping skills from my supervisors at the job that weirdly keeps me housed and emotionally supported, and the coaxing of a few friends to finally accept that I needed to ask for help on a bigger scale.

Now, I just hope another event will tack itself onto the end of that list and push me to figure out how to ask again and fix the mess I've ended up in this time.