This one isn't an easy one to write, folks. But here we are. It's been almost two months since I've written anything on this blog, and that doesn't really bother me to be honest.
I've been having an existential crisis of sorts. I don't know what a true one entails, and I don't particularly want to blow things out of proportion, but here's the facts. I think having them written down will help me recover or move on, or whatever it is that I need to do.
When I was younger, I distinctly remember having English language issues. Not anything severe, just a little mispronunciation here, some dyslexic tendencies there. Normal kid stuff, though, it never really effected school or social performances.
As I got older, I grew out of it. Mostly. I had a pretty wicked stutter when I was nervous, and still frequently have to force myself through it if I have to speak publicly. It's not inhibiting, just irritating. Thankfully, I don't really have to present often, so it's rare that it effects me.
About 7 weeks ago, my stutter started occurring in every day situations. I would get so hung up on words that I'd mentally shut down and have to start over, or shut down completely and have to stop. It went from a rare occurrence spurred on by stress and nerves, to an every few sentences issue that was debilitating.
Still, I didn't think anything of it.
Things in my life started getting hard. Most of my life I've been fortunate in that I just got things without trying. Not material things, more like concepts. I caught on fast and ideas kept growing like weeds. I've never really had any issues academically as a result, shit just made sense right off the bat, so I've never really had to struggle with that. Even into college, I thrived with this. Well, until I started getting bad critique after bad critique. Now, I've been in this world for a while now, bad critiques aren't anything new. But weeks on end, coupled with the sheer lack of time and resources to devote on improving begins to wear on a girl. I began to doubt everything.
This doubt and nervousness started to cause me to doubt everything. Why am I studying this if I'm so bad at it? Why am I going to school for this? Maybe I picked the wrong major? Wow, I'm really just not good at any of this. I'm wasting my life. I can't do this. I don't want to do this. I don't like any of this. I don't like anything. I don't want to do anything except sleep.
I don't want to do or be anything. I just don't want to do this anymore.
I started having social anxiety symptoms, and frequent panic attacks. Any time I had to do something that required me to exit my apartment caused a full on meltdown.
To add to my stress, I also managed to get promoted. This is something I've been trying to do for over a year, and it didn't give me any satisfaction. It just made things worse on an anxiety level.
I must've said something to my dad in one of our phone conversations that caused concern, cos he decided to come down for a weekend unplanned. He was here three days, and witnessed two panic attacks and a breakdown. I was pretty much nonfunctional, and I've never seen him so worried about me in my life.
After a long talk with him, he made me start realizing some things. First, he thinks I'm depressed. Which, I'm hesitant to fall into because I think true depression is something that gets overlooked a lot and I don't want to add to that problem. So back burner that.
Second, we decided that its likely in my best interest to take the summer off school and just enjoy life and try to find myself a little. I literally graduated high school and went to college a week later. Ignoring burnout isn't helping anyone, and a good indicator of my being burnt out is my disinterest in creating anything, even things I like to do. Like, I used to knit and crochet as means of a creative outlet. I can't even do that anymore. Everything stresses me out, and the idea of adding something else to an already full schedule makes me so nervous I could puke and also just go take a nap until everything just goes away.
The third thing I've come to realize is that I don't deal we'll without having set expectations anymore. I've been an adult adult all on my own for a mere five years, and I don't know how to process that. Like, I don't have anything to maintain that I don't want to, and there really isn't anything that I have to do. So what's the point? I hate everything right now, so I don't really give a shit to go to school, but not going is also not an option because I don't want to be in this position forever. But what about after that?
My mind isn't making any sense, but nothing else is either. I just legitimately don't understand how to process things anymore, and apparently that's alright but at the same time it isn't because it's not progress? I don't even know. What am I progressing toward? More shit I don't want to do? And if that's the case, then why am I doing the steps toward that?
This is a small portion of what I'm dealing with. I'm hoping against odds that taking some time off will help me, but I don't know what I'm expecting it to help. How do you fix something you don't understand?
I really just would feel better if the panic and anxiety issues would subside, but I don't even know where to begin with that.
This got longwinded, and there's so much more but I'm starting to lose motivation and attention, so my train of thought is all jumbled.
Cheers if you made it to here. Looks like this is gonna be an ongoing journey.
