Chloe B.

Photography by Ally Szabo

If you’re reading this, just feel.

“Chloe is great!” 

Throughout my life, I have always been described this way. Anytime somebody asked my parents how I was doing, a positive response always followed. I was seen as the easy child with no issues or problems. I listened to my parents and did what was right. I went to school, went to dance class, came home, and went to bed. My life has always been full of business, and I think that has always kept me stable. It has also kept me distracted from anything I was ever feeling.

My friends always said I had no emotions. They joked about how I was “stone cold,” and this was always true. I never really talked about anxiety or sadness, and on top of that, I never showed it. I never cried at movies, books, or songs. Not even Taylor Swift or The Fault in Our Stars could make me cry. I never expressed these feelings to family or friends; I told them everything about my life but never the deep parts. It was always uncomfortable to talk about and I never knew why. My mom always told me it was not good to bottle things up and I listened, but I never really believed it. I just kept to myself, and over time, that brought numbness. I always thought: “If I don’t have a physical reaction to what I am feeling or going through, is it even important? Is it even worth feeling?” 

I never really struggled with my mental health until my sophomore year of high school. Throughout my entire life, my brother was the one who has struggled. He has dealt with learning challenges and severe anxiety, but it wasn’t until later that it started to shift. My brother and my parents would get into fights constantly and I would just listen from my bedroom. I would open the door, stand at the top of the stairs, and simply listen. When the yelling ended, my parents would apologize, and I would say “It’s fine. I am ok.”

After a while, I felt like I was saying “I was fine” too much for anyone. The fighting became so regular that I just numbed away any feelings I had about the situation. I did not talk about it with anyone else because I did not know what I was supposed to say. I did not want people to pity me so I kept it to myself. My sophomore year of high school was a tough time for me socially and so on top of the stuff going on at home, I felt like school was not a place for me to escape. It became just another place full of sadness and confusion. I felt angry and sad during this time but did not know how to fix it. Things like watching Grey's Anatomy or hanging out with friends did not make me happy anymore. I felt like I had nowhere to go. 

Things got better for me because I was able to realize something: life is not linear. Just because I experienced hard times, did not mean I was never going to again.

I never really experienced anxiety until my senior year of high school. I had committed to Villanova and was in the second semester of my senior year. I had great friends who I loved and things at home were finally better for the first time in a long time. It was such a non-stressful time in my life where all I felt was joy and comfort. 

One day all of this quickly changed. I remember going to the gym one day and having a weird feeling. I felt lightheaded, my heart rate was high, and I felt myself getting faint. I got off the treadmill and ran to my car. It took me a while to calm down. That day I had assumed I had not eaten enough, but this assumption started to fade away as the same feeling started happening more often at the gym, at home, in school, and in the car. It became so bad that I would be driving on the highway to school afraid that I was going to crash my car. These I learned were panic attacks, but I did not understand why this was happening to me. I still don’t necessarily understand it. 

Looking back, I now understand that all of these feelings were part of God’s plan for me. I am Catholic and a firm believer in God’s plan. I know that everything in my life has happened for a reason in order for me to learn something about myself and to be able to live life fully with that lesson. 

With my previous history with mental health and emotion, I am able to come to terms with God’s intentions. He wanted me to process and feel. All of the past sadness and anger meant something, even if I was not physically reacting in a certain way. Just because I am not crying at something or talking about it does not mean I am mentally stable or “doing good.” He wanted me to feel all of this before going to college and living independently for the first time. My anxiety came at a time where I felt so comfortable in my life and ready for my new chapter. Although I felt ready, I was not ready yet and God knew that I needed to understand my mental health journey before starting a new chapter. 

I am so grateful that He did this for me, and through it all, I have found a deep passion for mental health. It has always been something I found to be important, but I was not able to truly understand it until I was face-to-face with it. I am now able to recognize my feelings and come to terms with them. I now know that it is okay to just feel, and that is a part of living. I believe that truly living is when you can grow and learn from experiences and can live with emotions and feelings that might be uncomfortable. 

Just because God has allowed me to recognize these things, it does not mean I no longer struggle. I am still struggling with anxiety and processing my emotions at times. My family still goes through periods of hardship and I still am not great at processing my emotions. It sounds like not much has changed for me but in reality, I am now able to recognize what I am feeling. It may sound small but it is something that has tremendously impacted my life. I am so proud of how far I have come in the past few years, and hope to reduce the stigma around mental health in the future.

If You’re Reading This, you deserve to grow through struggle and allow yourself to feel.

Chloe B., Villanova University

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