It’s Okay To Not Be Okay

“It’s like, I know I’m not doing very well, and I know I’ve been this way for a while, but at the same time, I’m like, ‘Is this really depression, or...?’”

My two friends and I were headed back to campus after a much-needed girls night out at the Galleria Mall, where we’d decided to treat ourselves to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory after window shopping and daydreaming about what life would be like if we weren’t broke college kids.

As we headed back to Webster, our conversation shifted to school and relationship-related stress, with one of my friends confessing that she was wondering whether it might be time to break up with her boyfriend. On top of that, she also said she was stressing pretty hard over a few classes, and she still couldn’t seem to figure out which major she should pursue. Through the lump in her throat, she told us she’d been pretty overwhelmed with life for a while, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.

For a lot of college kids, this seems like the unavoidable reality: constant stress about paying for tuition, going to class, finishing homework, trying to make new friends, adjusting to dorm life, making time for clubs and socializing, trying to stay connected to friends and family back home, on top of doing laundry, trying to eat somewhat healthy, attempting to get enough sleep... it’s no wonder we’re so overwhelmed!

A little bit of stress is healthy, and nearly everyone deals with school-related anxiety at some point. But when it gets to the level of constant breakdowns and crying sessions, shutting yourself away from the rest of the world and skipping classes because you’re just too overwhelmed to function, thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or forgetting to do simple tasks like shower, brush your teeth, or even eat, something is definitely wrong.

I know many friends at Webster who seem to be struggling with depression and/or anxiety, but who hesitate to admit it. I think a lot of us are nervous that if we say we’re depressed, someone who struggles with major depression is going to get offended because we’re nowhere near as depressed as they are, and therefore we need to shut up and just be happy with what we’ve got. (Which, for the record, is a load of bullshit. Just because someone’s situation is seemingly worse than yours, it doesn’t mean that you’re not still allowed to be upset and express your emotions.) Either that, or you’ll become paranoid that everyone is going to look at you and whisper, “Did you hear she has depression??? I wonder if she tried to kill herself… she’s probably wearing that sweater because she self-harms.”

Even if these scenarios might not necessarily happen, there’s still some uncertainty over what we should do about mental health issues like depression. Should we just ride it out and hope we’ll feel better someday in the future? Should we go to a doctor? What would we even say to a doctor? Do we need therapy? Will we have to take pills for the rest of our lives? And what if all the treatments don’t seem to work on us, and we’re forced to accept that this is just how life is going to be from now on?

“It’s perfectly okay and completely normal to struggle with your mental health during such a tumultuous time in your life.”

My purpose here is to tell you that it’s okay to ask yourself all those questions and more. It’s perfectly okay and completely normal to struggle with your mental health during such a tumultuous time in your life. It doesn’t mean you’re messed up, it doesn’t mean that life will always be this stressful, and it doesn’t mean that you’re alone.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that it’s perfectly okay to not be okay.

My Story

My first experiences with depression and anxiety started around 2007/2008, A.K.A. the worst years of any person’s life: middle school. At first, I figured it was just puberty messing with my hormones and making me feel super emotional about the smallest of things. I shrugged it off easily enough back then, more concerned with basketball practice and my iPod (ahh, the simple life of a 13-year-old). When I got to high school, I received more frequent visits from depression and anxiety, usually in the form of heartbreak over unrequited crushes or extreme frustration about clingy “friends” who were driving me crazy.

It wasn’t until right after I graduated high school that I realized what was going on – but even then, I avoided seeing a doctor. At the time, I told myself that my feelings were all just situational, and I was sure that once I found the perfect college and got settled in, everything would turn out fine.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

I only made it through half a semester of college at a school in Tennessee before I decided to drop out. My life was absolutely miserable – I cried my eyes out at least once a day, had zero motivation to do any homework or go to my classes, I became very critical of myself, and I had extremely frequent thoughts of suicide. I figured that once I left that school and got back home, everything would turn out fine.

And once again, that’s not what happened.

After I moved back home, I got my first job working at a local music/movie/video game store called Slackers, and I thought it would be a fantastic fit for me – but I was wrong. The job was way more overwhelming than I’d expected, I didn’t really click with any of my coworkers, and I was only getting one small shift a week. I started applying for other places, hoping that maybe once I figured out my job situation, I could take some time to figure out where I really wanted to go to school, and then everything would turn out fine.

But that’s not what happened.

Although I did find another job at Barnes & Noble, I still had an extremely difficult time figuring out where I wanted to go to school. In the meantime, I started falling harder and harder for a coworker who unfortunately already had a serious girlfriend and wasn’t interested in me in the slightest. This of course sent my self-confidence spiraling ever more downward, and heartbreak followed me for months, until – thank God – my unrequited crush got a manager position at a different store. He left, and I was finally able to get over him without having to see him every day at work and watch him be cute with his girlfriend at work parties. I thought that finally, now that he was out of the picture, I could figure out what school I wanted to go to, and everything would turn out fine.

“At the time, I told myself that my feelings were all just situational, and I was sure that once I found the perfect college and got settled in, everything would turn out fine.”

Guess what? That’s not what happened.

Shortly after the whole unrequited crush experience, I visited Webster University and decided it would be a good starting place to begin my college career. At that point, I’d been out of high school for two years, and I was ready to get out of my parents’ house and back to class. Although Webster wasn’t my “dream school,” I knew we could afford it, and I knew it was a comfortable place close to home that would help me get back on my feet again and figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. Plus, I’d get to keep my job, and I’d most likely get to study abroad, which would be awesome.

Webster seemed like a great fit for me, so I applied and was accepted almost immediately. Having at last made a decision about college that I felt okay about, I hoped that this would finally be the moment when everything turned out fine.

Do I even need to say it?

Obviously, everything wasn’t fine.

Just Do Something

Before I go any further, I want to put a little disclaimer here: I am a big supporter of modern medicine, but I know there are other options out there. When I’m talking with someone about depression, I’m always quick to recommend seeing a doctor or at least talking to a counselor, because those two things have really worked well for me.

That being said, though, I know there are all kinds of other methods out there for treating mental health issues, and I’m sure that for some people, those other methods would work way better than therapy and antidepressants. So if you’re a bit freaked out by conventional medical treatments and you want to see what else is out there, I’d definitely encourage you to do some research and figure out what works best for you. While I am a big supporter of modern medicine, I’m an even bigger supporter of figuring out what unique path works best for you in your given situation.

But the one thing I will ALWAYS recommend, regardless of your treatment preference, is just simply doing something. It took me two and a half years of sleepless nights, suicidal thoughts, stomach aches, emotional breakdowns, self-criticisms, needlessly difficult decisions, and heartbreak before I finally saw a doctor and confirmed what I’d known all along.

Honestly, I think the main reason I was having such a difficult time settling on a school wasn’t because I didn’t fit in there, or because I was unsure of a specific major, or whatever – it was because of my depression. I was waiting for that gut feeling that said, “Yes! This is where I want to go to school!” but it never came because I was too depressed and anxious all the time to ever have a lasting gut feeling like that. Once I finally saw my doctor and started taking antidepressants, I was able to figure out that Webster was a good first choice, and now I honestly feel like I could go to all kinds of different schools and be happy there.

Despite the fact that my struggles after high school definitely taught me lots of things and helped shape me as a person, I really do wish I had seen a doctor sooner. Looking back, I know that a lot of the difficult things I went through before coming to Webster were definitely not necessary, and I know that if I had just gotten the help I had needed back when I first realized I might need it, things would have been a lot easier for me.

“The one thing I will ALWAYS recommend, regardless of your treatment preference, is just simply doing something.”

I think the most important thing I’ve learned throughout all of this is that if you feel like something is wrong, then it probably is. Second-guessing yourself and making up excuses and ignoring the problem is only going to make things worse in the long run, so if you feel even slightly prone to depressed feelings, I would definitely recommend talking to someone about it. Trust your gut, and don’t let the problem fester until it gets worse. Even if it’s awkward and you feel uncomfortable... just give it a shot. You’ll never know until you try, right?

The Stigma

Like any normal person, I was nervous to talk to my parents and to my doctor about depression. I didn’t want to make things awkward, and I didn’t want people to excessively worry about me and make the whole situation even worse. If I was acting a bit out-of-it, it was easy enough to blame my feelings on work-related stress, or confusion about my college search, or whatever other situations I was facing. Blaming depression and anxiety seemed like a scary thing, and I wasn’t quite sure why.

Personally, I feel like depression is such a seemingly “taboo” topic because instead of telling others what’s going on and seeking help, depressed people tend to stay silent and hide away from the world to suffer in quiet. The result is that those people who have never dealt with mental health issues like depression are often times completely clueless about them; which means it’s up to those of us who have dealt with it first-hand to raise our voices and reach out to others.

Whenever I first talked with my mom about depression, I was genuinely surprised about how little she understood. After knowing so many people who struggle with their mental health, reading all about it on the internet, and dealing with depression and anxiety myself, it came as a shock to me that my mom had no idea what depression actually might feel like:

“So, whenever you get depressed, is it just kinda like you get really sad for a while and then it goes away? I mean, I feel like a lot of it might be treatable just through things like eating healthy and getting exercise and stuff, don’t you? And do you think this might all just be stress-related or episodic or something? Because I remember back when I was in college, I was so stressed about finishing this big paper, that I just broke down and couldn’t stop crying... so is it like that, but more frequent?”

It felt so weird to me to have to explain to my mom that no, my depression wasn’t episodic; it was a constant fog that affected every aspect of my life. And no, depression isn’t the same thing as being stressed over a paper; the kind of stress I deal with is the kind that overwhelms you so much that you can hardly bring yourself to get out of bed in the morning. Exercising might be good for you, but I can barely even take a shower without feeling exhausted, so how on earth am I supposed to motivate myself to go for a run?? The whole time I was talking to her, I was thinking to myself, “How can you not know what depression is really like!?”

But then I realized the reality that not everyone is going to completely understand what’s going on in your life when you say you have depression. The reason there’s so much stigma around the word “depression” is because a lot of people genuinely have no clue what it’s like to suffer from it. While that may seem like a scary reality, it actually gives us a good opportunity to clear the air behind the awkward stigma of mental health issues and help others understand how they can help us best.

“I realized the reality that not everyone is going to completely understand what’s going on in your life when you say you suffer from depression.”

Thanks to my experiences, my family and friends are now much more understanding and supportive when it comes to my struggles with depression, and I can tell that even if they don’t completely get what I’m going through, they’ll still give it their best shot and try to meet me where I am and help me out.

Now that I’ve started being more open with my mom about my depression and anxiety, it’s nowhere near as awkward or nerve-wracking as it was at first, and I can tell she’s really starting to understand the ins and outs of what’s going on in my life and why I might have been acting certain ways in the past.

“Near the end of high school when you seemed to spend a lot of time in your room and you seemed like you were in a bad mood all the time, I just figured you were going through your hormonal teenager years a bit late,” my mom told me. “But now that I know it was depression, it all makes sense.”

Getting Help

So what’s the next step, then? How do you talk about depression? Who should you talk to first, and what are you supposed to say to them?

I promise you, talking to doctors and counselors is far easier than it might seem at first, mainly because they deal with situations just like yours on a regular basis. They know exactly what you’re going through and what questions to ask to figure out how to get you the best treatment possible, so if you do feel awkward or don’t know what to say, just tell them what’s been going on as best as you can and let them guide the conversation from there.

I was too nervous to talk to my parents face-to-face, so what I ended up doing was texting my mom from work one day and saying something along the lines of, “Hey, could you do me a huge favor and schedule a doctor’s appointment for me? I think I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety a lot lately, and I feel like I should definitely see what my doctor recommends.”

The whole process was much easier than I’d anticipated, honestly: at my appointment, I told my doctor as much as I could about what had happened and how I’d felt over the past two years. I told him about how difficult it was for me to make even the simplest of decisions, how little motivation I had to even get out of bed in the morning, how often I would start crying and not be able to stop, how frustrated and emotional I would get about the dumbest little things, how tired I felt all the time, how I felt like I was constantly shutting myself away in my room, and how I had frequent thoughts about how much easier life would be if I could just disappear.

“Talking to doctors and counselors is far easier than it might seem at first... They know exactly what you’re going through and what questions to ask to figure out how to get you the best treatment possible”

After I finished talking, my doctor nodded understandingly and said, “Yeah, I definitely agree that you’re struggling here. This definitely does sound like depression. And I bet that even before you graduated high school, you felt like this from time to time, right?” I hadn’t thought about it until he said it, but he was absolutely right. Looking back, I could see all sorts of situations that were obviously affected by depression – I just didn’t realize it at the time.

My doctor then took me through my options going forward: I could start off on a low dose of antidepressants, give it a few weeks to kick in, and then either bump up the prescription or switch to a different pill entirely if I wasn’t seeing any improvement. “It might take a while to figure out what prescription works best,” he said, “Because there are TONS of options out there for antidepressants, and they all work differently depending on the person. But if we keep trying, something is eventually bound to work out for you.”

In addition to (or instead of) taking pills, my doctor also told me he could recommend me to a therapist nearby if I felt like talking things out with someone would be more beneficial for me. At the time, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of therapy, so I decided I’d just start with the pills. It took a few months, but after switching dosages, then switching to a different type of antidepressant, then switching dosages again, I finally feel like I’ve found a prescription that works for me.

“It’s an incredibly difficult hurdle to jump, but I promise you, once you tell someone about what you’re experiencing, talking about it just gets easier and easier.”

If you’re not sure about seeing a doctor straight away, there are always free counselors available on campus who are ready and willing to talk about what you’re going through and help you decide what steps to take next. The Health Center on campus is open Mondays through Fridays every week from 8:30 A.M. until 4:30 P.M. (although they are closed on weekends and campus holidays). They’re located over by the parking garage on Garden Avenue; just look for the big, two-story blue house.

Making an appointment with a counselor is as easy as stopping by the office and simply asking the person at the front desk, “Could I make an appointment with a counselor, please?” If you don’t have time to stop by the office, you can always call the Health Center at (314)-246-4207 and ask to schedule an appointment with a counselor that way. There are lots of counselors available, and they’re definitely able to work with your schedule to get you the help you need.

I should also mention here that seeing a counselor doesn’t automatically have to become a weekly thing – maybe you’ll go once, realize it’s not for you, and decide to avoid scheduling another appointment. Or maybe you’ll be like me – I went in expecting to speak with a counselor just once to get some advice about whether or not I should move to a higher dosage of antidepressants, but I’ve been back once a week ever since then because I’ve found it very helpful for me. My counselor is awesome, and she’s great at helping me manage my depression while working through whatever situation I’m facing.

It’s an incredibly difficult hurdle to jump, but I promise you, once you tell someone about what you’re experiencing, talking about it just gets easier and easier.

Take Care Of Yourself

Ultimately, the most important thing you could ever do is take care of yourself. One of the most impactful things my counselor has said to me is this: “Before you make a decision – even if it’s just a small decision – stop for a second and ask yourself, ‘Who am I helping here? Who am I doing this for? Myself, or someone else?’”

Although it is important to think about others, letting them become the determining factor in every situation is a very dangerous move. Even a simple decision such as, “Should I go hang out with my friends tonight, or should I stay in and finish a little homework so that I’m not so overwhelmed tomorrow?” can have a major impact on someone who is struggling with their mental health.

“Before you make a decision – even if it’s just a small decision – stop for a second and ask yourself, ‘Who am I helping here? Who am I doing this for? Myself, or someone else?’”

Remembering to take care of yourself is especially important when it comes to making bigger decisions, such as seeing a doctor or counselor, taking time off of school, or taking time off of work to make sure you’re getting the help you need. It can be very tempting to consider how your decisions will affect the people around you (“Will I worry my family and friends? Will my roommate be okay living alone if I have to leave before the year ends? Will my co-workers be overwhelmed if I have to leave work for a while?”) but in order to take care of yourself, you need to do what works best for you, not everyone else.

Everyone has their own specific part to play in this big, crazy thing we call life. If you neglect to take care of yourself, you’re not only doing damage to yourself; you’re also depriving everyone else around you of your unique personality.

It sounds a bit backwards, but by taking care of your own needs first, what you’re actually doing is making sure that you’re the best version of yourself you can possibly be, which will ultimately benefit everyone around you.

It Does Get Better

Unfortunately, the reality of depression is that there is no solid cure. Even though I’ve found an antidepressant that works well for me, I still have bad days every now and then. Certain situations still overwhelm me, and from time to time, I still struggle with thoughts about wishing I could just disappear from the face of the earth.

Although I can’t promise that everything will magically be okay and that you’ll never feel depressed ever again, I can promise you that there is hope. It takes time to climb up out of the hole of depression, and you might lose your grip and slip back down a few times before you actually get to the surface. But pretty soon, your good days will start to outnumber your bad days, and you’ll look back on your struggles and wonder why you waited so long to reach out and get help.

Life is a crazy ride, and we all have an important part to play. So don’t miss out! Take care of yourself, get the help you need, and remember that it’s perfectly okay to not be okay.