Anonymous
Photography by Sarah Tyner
If you’re reading this, please, just keep reading.
To set the mood, today was my very last Georgia Tech football game before I graduate. Not only did I skip the tailgates and the game (go jackets amiright!), but I have spent my Saturday night alone in my apartment starting a 1000-piece puzzle and writing this letter. For some background, six months ago, I did not feel safe enough with my own thoughts to spend a night, especially a historically social night, completely by myself. Look at me now. . . I spent this night both at peace with my evening and with my brain. All I can say is “holy shit: how did I get here?”
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I think the majority of students at Tech, myself included, have grown up in a mindset that if I can achieve *fill in the ______*, then I will be fulfilled. And for the majority of our lives, this identity has sculpted us into successful, albeit stressed and perfection-seeking, humans. We have grown into a self, rewarded completely by external success—our worth became rooted in our achievements. College can take a hit on that identity. For me, I questioned if this intellectual self that has culminated for years meant anything at all? Suddenly, my future—deemed “perfect” by middle school me—was no longer what I wanted, and I felt trapped. If not this, then who am I? Without my academic success, what will make me matter? How can I love who I am if I'm not who I thought I’d be?
If any of those questions resonated with you, sorry—I can’t offer a straightforward solution. However, I did learn that in situations where I feel trapped in a decision, a relationship, a lifestyle, a belief, I have a choice. A choice to alter my internalized beliefs, to abandon my current narrative, to pick a different path and still matter, be loved, and experience a new kind of success. A choice does not mean that you trust the options at hand, nor may they seem desirable. Perhaps one side of the choice is scarier, more unknown, or harder to see than the other. Maybe the choice is one you refuse to accept for yourself, BUT in every situation there is a choice that you get to make. Obviously easier said than done, yet this idea of choice birthed some of my greatest moments of healing and discovery. I learned that I could find reward and worth outside of external validation. For me, choice returns the control to me, suddenly I am not ruled by an environment or identity that I don’t want, and finally, I have a say.
Okay great, the TLDR is you have a choice. If you are like me, you skipped over that entire paragraph to get to any mention of depression, anxiety, and suicidality because there must be an exception for people like us. The most painful reality I had to accept is that while mental illness does make things exceptionally harder and the choices in front of you may feel remarkably dim, you still have a choice. Sometimes one side of the choice felt like I was facing an upward incline with weights on both of my ankles and walking down was the only option. Or maybe the harder option was staying in bed all day instead of finding a way out of this world.
Yes, the choices in those situations were dim and yes, in those moments I felt like there was no choice, and yes, there were times when I chose the easier option, but moving towards that harder option is how I learned to trust myself. And after 1000 times of making that harder choice, it got easier. It is a hard concept to wrap your head around in the moment—it is so difficult to escape a mindset that you have been trapped in for days, weeks, or even months. And even though you can’t always choose the thoughts that arise, you can choose your reaction to them. Pause in these moments, notice that you do have a choice, and even when one option feels remarkably harder than the other, it doesn’t make it impossible.
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When I used to read these letters, I would look for anything that made me the exception. That made me different from the writer so that I had an out. Maybe the writer wasn’t as fucked up as me or maybe they were more fucked up than me and they most definitely did not understand my story! But whether they had it worse or better does not negate your experience. When you are in it deep, the hardest thing to believe is that you are not alone, that you can get better, and despite the people who have recovered before you, you believe that you will never recover. I have nothing wise to say except I see you, I hear you, I was not the exception and you don’t have to be either. This point is not to say that your experience isn’t unique to you. It’s true—there is no person who has experienced exactly what you are going through. However, even different experiences lead back to the same core emotions and fears. Take a minute. Be truly vulnerable with someone. Those moments breed the most authentic connection. And as it turns out, we humans actually share quite a lot with each other—at least, we are all navigating a very human existence on this pale blue dot.
At this point, it feels important to talk about my own recovery from depression and suicidality. It started with therapy and psychiatry—two things I adamantly believed did not work for me. In some ways, I was right. It took a minute to find a therapist that pushed and supported me in the ways I needed, and honestly, I am still a skeptic on medication (even though I take it every day, so I clearly haven’t lost all faith). While results were not immediate, things started to shift with every session I had and medication I tried. Come to find out that learning about yourself, your fears, and the things you never want to accept can be incredibly painful—growth and healing does not always mean constant shifts in the positive direction. While it did take a minute to really see the other side, the in-between part still had its fair share of rewards. It is freeing to watch yourself heal—to see parts of yourself with such firmly rooted beliefs discover a new perspective.
There was no single moment where I suddenly became “better.” Growing, Healing, Becoming is a slow process. There’s no “All you have to do is ____” when it comes to relearning to live peacefully in yourself and the world around you. Therapy is a way to feel supported through this process. At first it's a relief, someone to help carry the weight. As your relationship builds, you soon realize you’ve started carrying more and more of the weight on your own. Eventually, your painful thoughts shift from hourly into once a day until eventually days, weeks, and months pass, and you realize you no longer bear the weight that you once so hopelessly carried. Therapy teaches you connection, vulnerability, and most importantly, how to trust that you are capable of seeing your fears and not letting those fears control you. Be prepared, it takes time to establish these new neural networks after previous ones have been engrained for so long, and there will still be times when those old networks fire and a part of you that has been gone for so long shows its face. I am still learning to trust that a bad week or return of a wounded part does not mean that I am back where I used to be. Once you start healing, you will never be back where you used to be.
After reading or skimming this letter, I hope you connected in at least some way. I hope that if you are struggling in any form, you find help. (At this point, I should probably plug my therapist because every idea I talk about in this letter came from her). Even if this letter didn’t resonate with you, I hope you can see how much I learned about myself just by getting help— and *cue infomercial* you can too!
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Finally, thank you for reading my thoughts. In all honesty, I have been hesitant to write this letter for quite some time. It is terrifying to talk about what I’ve learned because it forces me to believe that it really happened—that I may actually have healed a bit. And even though it is incredibly scary to trust myself in this moment, I would not have written any of this if I didn’t genuinely believe what I said.
If you’re reading this, please, just keep reading because . . .
You are not the exception. You have a choice. And getting that support to take even a little bit of the weight off of your own load, just might save your life. I genuinely believe it saved mine.
Anonymous, Georgia Tech
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