Anxiety Support Group
Anxiety is a physical condition marked by intense and persistent feelings of distress, fear, angst or dread. General anxiety caused by routine day-to-day stresses usually passes quickly and is experienced by almost everyone at one time or another. However, such feelings that linger over time and are very difficult to cope with, and which lack a clear cause, may indicate...
Hello,
I used to be a straight A, top student at my high school. After going through some trauma earlier this year I don’t feel the same anymore. I’ve been having trouble concentrating, though I’ve been regaining focus slowly in the past few months. I used to love school but now I dread it because I’ve been placed in so many difficult academic situations as a result of my current condition. Telling my teachers about my depression and anxiety has been hard, mostly because mental illness has stigmas attached to it. I don’t know how people will react, and I don’t want people who I thought I could trust to turn on me suddenly because I’m no longer a “normal person”. I now have really bad trust issues because of the experiences I’ve went through during medical treatments. I find it hard to trust people, yet I’m still willing to give people a chance. That frustrates me because I feel like I should be closed off but I’m not. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
I was on track academically to do well and have a higher chance of getting into top colleges like Harvard, but right now I’m definitely not at the top of my game and I can’t help it. I’m a high school senior right now and filling out college and scholarship applications make me even more anxious and stressed out, because (1) I feel like I messed up my chances of getting into top colleges this year because of what I went through, (2) I had to drop a lot of extra-curriculars because I had to focus on my health, and (3) I worry that I’m not good enough for those colleges. I know colleges and universities may discriminate against applicants with mental illnesses and reject them in fear that they would harm themselves. This just makes me feel even more alienated from “normal people” who fortunately don’t have to go through the struggles of mental illnesses. I don’t want my trauma to define who I am now, because I know I can do better. However, I’m also scared of how people, especially teachers, think of me now because right now I seem like a really bad student. A school staff member said that I’m projected to fail based on my performance in school, and that makes me even more anxious. I’ve fallen so much from being a top student that now I’m probably one of the lower ones. She also said that my perfectionist mentality makes my teachers feel pressured, and so now I feel like I’m such a burden to my teachers and my school, and that makes me feel awful. I don’t feel welcome at my school anymore because of that.
I don’t want to be judged based on this year of my life. It’s unfair. I hate to be misunderstood, and I think that being introverted makes people misunderstand me even more. I have a hard time expressing my feelings because I don’t think I’m important enough to other people. I don’t have a lot of friends and people don’t usually talk to me. It makes me anxious to talk, because I come from a family that mostly speaks another language at home. I feel like I always manage to mess up my sentences or pronunciations when I speak, and that makes me feel embarrassed. One time I pronunciated a word wrong and my friend had to correct it for me. A nearby student started laughing at me, and I didn’t know what to do. This was 2 years ago and I still remember that moment.
Right now I’m just living in a daze, floating through space. My life still continues to fall apart, yet I feel kind of numb. I know people say that life is a large percentage of how you react to it, but I can’t control how I react to it.
Thanks for listening while I ramble on. I just feel so alone right now.
This is a stressful stage in your life right now, college applications and financial aid are known triggers for anxiety. Remember that there are many roads that lead to success. It is possible to go to a smaller, less stressful school to begin with - and then transfer to a more prestigious school. Remember, its only where you graduate from that is displayed on the diploma, no one knows how you got there.
My suggestion for you is to carve out a little room in your life for your peace of mind. Work on your anxiety & depression first. Truthfully, unless these are managed, your entire college journey will only be more hectic and stressful than it has to be.
Look for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and learn to manage your thoughts. Carve out time in your schedule for "self care" (taking care of yourself!) and dont get swept away with life all day long - spend time caring for you!
Be patient. And be flexible. Our journeys do not always follow the path we expect. We often fall into a belief that things are supposed to happen exactly the way we want. And when it does not, it causes us suffering. Be open and flexible in your expectations of life. Often our journeys are completely unpredictable and most of what we do is unforeseen.
Wishing you all the best - and most of all, peace!
I'm thinking imposter syndrome, shy, anxious, possibly have ADHD which presents diff for women than men.
You don't say why you crashed and burned, but I have crashed and burned 3 times
1. law school - really bad personal situation caused inability not only to focus, but to care on whether I focused or not;
2. Piano burnout. - got to grade 6 with distinction learning after 3 1/2 yrs as an adult. was becoming exhausted at 3 hrs practice a day plus job, plus family, plus lifestyle block. told teacher I needed a break and to play for fun for a year. Her idea of a break was to do a performance of the feckin french suite in G by Bach, just a performance you know.
I burned out completely and was unable to do so much as a scale for years.
Don't even think the french suites were worth it. Not interesting enough for me to die on the funeral pyre of the blasted things.
3. nervous breakdown. a culmination of many things, most of them being far too driven and suffering a lot of guilt, a lot of sense of failure.
I think if you're going to be burned out now, what's more important than anything is to have the whole burnout now. And to understand that it's burnout. This is what happens to you when you burn out. This is what burnout is. Your brain actually fries. It becomes useless for a while. it is a thing that happens to you, that you cannot control.
A hard lesson. Very hard right now, as the price-tag is probably your preferred university. But you know what? You and your family just have to face that. Somebody pushed you till the wheels fell off, and the wheels fell off.
You can see what you can salvage, how much you can regrow. but be kind to yourself.
And you're not mentally ill. You've had a trauma to the brain.
You understand? Huge difference.
You need to identify how it was caused, and you have to organically recover from it like a lightning strike, and you take this lesson with you in life about balance.
Counselling will do wonders. As will joining a social group, getting out there, reading up on adhd and autism and seeing if any of it is you. Anxiety and imposter syndrome are common among perfectionists, but why are they perfectionists? investigate. Be your own project.
xx
@anxietypath - Thank you for suggesting CBT. I will check it out and see if it'll work for me. I'm planning on taking a little time out of my day to write in a journal to help me organize my thoughts.
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@momonthego2019 - I'm glad to hear that you managed to turn your life around through your own efforts! Your story gives me faith that I will be able to do so too. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
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@bridgie101 - You're quite spot-on. I've always been shy and anxious. I've read about impostor syndrome somewhere sometime ago, but completely forgot about it until you mentioned it just now. Whenever I accomplish something, I want to feel happy for myself, but I end up feeling like I don't deserve what I earned. I guess I'm too hard on myself.
I do think that I have mental illness, and not just because of the trauma I experienced. I have been dealing with depression and anxiety for at least five years now and I've managed to keep them under control, up until this year when I experienced trauma. It ended up intensifying these conditions to the point where I couldn't control them anymore. As you mentioned about burning out, I think it was part of the reason why I had such a "bad reaction" to the trauma. I put so much pressure on myself to do well in school and everything bad started happening at the same time (bad timing).
Thank you for sharing your story :).
If you drive a car in the wrong gear you'll damage bits of it. It will malfunction. No accelleration, etc. root the gears, damage the clutch.
The car itself may be a perfectly normal car, but if you are driving it wrong, it won't perform and it will break. If you think the car is faulty you won't review your driving. If you don't see anyone changing into 3rd or 4th gears, you may think 2nd gear is all there is.
What I'm saying is that you are unlikely to have anything fundamentally wrong with your brain, but you're very likely to have a lot fundamentally wrong with how you use it.
We all do. We all spend years uncovering our own biases, and false views. Things that just tie us down.
So don't rush to call yourself mentally ill. Look around you for real world suggestions and ideas to improve your happiness. Always stay practical and proactive and in the real world. If you do this, you can solve a lot of problems. Quite often it IS about the nail.
My point with all this is, the evidence and the logic behind mental illness is very much present, and to blame all those people whose brains aren’t working right for their problems seems kind of unreasonable. Yes, there’s ways to improve how you think, how you process things. But that usually takes work, treatment, etc., which not everyone feels ready for. After all, not everyone takes their asthma medication, right? Or goes in to the doctor when they’ve been having trouble breathing for awhile? It’s only when these problems become serious enough to threaten your life that whether you seek treatment or not is not really your choice anymore, simply for your own safety. I don’t know all these things about mental illness for certain, but it’s simply the way I see it.
Also, I’ve struggled with stigma before. People saying things to me without really realizing how stigmatized they are. It makes it harder to trust people with your struggles because of what they might say or do in response.
I’m sorry you’re going through all this :( prayers <3
One thing I'm very scared and worried about is my teachers losing faith in me. Three out of my four teachers know about my situation, but I'm worried that they're starting to get impatient with me. At this point, I'm honestly trying my best. Sometimes I can't concentrate in class, so it takes me longer to finish reading certain things. Yes, I still get frustrated with myself because I'm still not back at the same level I was operating at a whole year ago, but I tell myself that things are getting better (my concentration is improving, etc), even though its happening at a snail's pace. I'm trying to be patient with myself, and I hope others will too. I don't want people to ask why I'm not better after a year. I, personally, realize that people heal at different rates, but some people don't stop to consider that.
Sometimes I feel like all people want is results, and since it seems like I haven't been able to create any substantial (positive) results lately, I get really hard on myself, and other people may not think I'm worthy enough for their time. I'm afraid that people that I know, people that I interact with daily, will turn their backs on me while I'm struggling.
This then ties back into my supposed "imposter syndrome" situation where I feel that I don't deserve any of my accomplishments, and therefore I don't deserve other people's attention in the first place. This might be touching down into depression a bit, which is something that I struggle with as well, but it is very much relevant here because I'm constantly feeling on edge, anxious that someone will begin to think that I'm an absolute fraud and that I'm actually not as intelligent as I present myself to be. I know deep down this isn't true (I'm not a fraud because I have worked so incredibly hard to get where I am academically today), but my brain ends up bringing up every flaw I have and bad experiences I've had and twisting them into reasons as to why I'm not worthy. I'm scared that people who happen to walk into this certain chapter of my life will see my current situation and judge me based on that--completely disregarding all my hard work in the past.
I want to see this healing process as something positive, like how I'm becoming a more empathetic person. I really do, but sometimes I can't because there's so much stigma attached to it. I do feel broken. I can't deal with people right now who retreat from me because they don't know how to deal with people with mental illnesses. Just because I'm struggling with depression and anxiety, am I suddenly a completely different person? I'm still the same person, but with a few added characteristics. I'm scared that people will tell me I'm being over-dramatic and that I'm looking for attention. As an introvert, being in the center of attention, especially if its for something negative, is something that I avoid as much as I can. Right now, I just really want more love and empathy.
I apologize if my thoughts are jumbled in this post. I'm feeling really tired and am feeling the effects of relapse (poor focus and memory).
Thanks for being patient and reading through my posts.