This is a legacy blog post, originally from my previous website, Mouse House Blog. To see more MHB posts, check out the MHB tag here on my blog.
2016 was pretty universally agreed to be a crappy year. In world politics we have the disasters of Brexit and the American election, there have been a spectacular number of heartbreaking celebrity deaths (don’t get me started on Anton Yelchin or Ron Glass… still grieving), there are increasing numbers of stories about police brutality and horrific prejudice, and the world’s just kind of a mess in general. It seems like a lot of people have had rough years personally as well. I’m no exception to that – for me 2016 has been pretty bad.
A lot of things have been going on that are out of my control but hard not to let affect me, including things with family members’ health, the never-ending struggle with money, a really heavy semester to start my fourth year, and my mental health taking a real dive. It all becomes a terrible cycle when that many things go badly – it’s hard to achieve any balance at all when everything is out of sorts. When staying on top of all of my schoolwork and readings (which were so time-consuming this term!) I never had time for anything else, which was always terrible for my health. If I slacked on my school work, I felt guilty for all the time I wasn’t working. With my anxiety running high, it was harder to take care of my physical health, not to mention the fact that all the stress exacerbated existing sleep problems to a ridiculous point. My slew of anxieties all working together and stewing around with the high level of stress from both school and personal life transformed into something that rather alarmingly resembled depression when I thought too much about it. This was a really tough semester to get through and several times near the end there I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the remaining weeks. It felt kind of impossible. A lot of the pressure is off now that the semester is over but there’s been plenty of holiday stress and general this-break-is-too-short anxiety to deal with since, and I don’t have a great deal of time before my next semester arrives.
Imposter Syndrome in particular is something I struggle with a lot lately. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with mental illness, especially anxieties, which I have plenty of. I swing constantly between feeling awful and trying to convince myself nothing is really wrong. It was even worse with the depression because I have no diagnosis – I’m a strong proponent of self-diagnosis in general, but it’s still hard to convince myself that’s really what’s happening to me (no matter how closely I match anecdotes and descriptions of the experience from both friends and other sources) when I haven’t had a knowledgeable outside source confirm it for me. I even feel it when I’m physically unwell – it’s possible that I have the same autonomic disorder my younger brother is diagnosed with, though I haven’t been able to pursue diagnosis myself despite matching the symptoms, but I might also just be a big unhealthy mess, right? I also get a lot of Imposter Syndrome over struggling as a student, given that I’m in English. The STEM fields are the ones famous for being huge amounts of work in school, while humanities tend to be thought of as the lighter degrees. I have plenty of friends studying in STEM fields and I know how much work they’re always doing. I would never disagree that it’s a lot! But then I convince myself that because I’m doing an ‘easy’ degree it must be my fault I struggle to keep up, not the school’s – even though I know that our educational system is hugely stressful and puts enormous pressure on students, regardless of their field of study.
I had a lot of goals going into this school year. I was really, really trying at school for kind of the first time ever – I’ve always been smart enough to get away with coasting, but I thought it was time for me to really learn how to work at it. I’m not sure what gave me the motivation for that – I rarely possess much motivation for anything other than personal projects – but it was probably a lot of things. It was my first time starting the year with a bujo, which certainly does increase my productivity/keep me on track; I’m surrounded by people who are getting older and more responsible; the bujo community is FULL of pretty studygrams; I myself am slowly beginning to feel more like a grownup in certain ways and I’ve been exploring ways to act more like one (yikes). Whatever it was, I did that thing where I took it too far – sometimes I can only do all or nothing; I either don’t care at all or I obsess. I went from putting often-minimal effort into my schoolwork to throwing myself into it completely and feeling ridiculously guilty for everything I didn’t get done and all the time I spent doing other things. Besides school, I was also setting a lot of goals for my health, my blog, my art and writing… I couldn’t keep up with everything, especially with the weight of a work-heavy term and outside stress, but not living up to all those goals was killer on my conscience. I felt awful for not doing everything I told myself I would and that only fed into the vicious cycle of stress and anxiety.
I spoke to my doctor around the end of the term about my mood, which I think began declining before the semester even began, but definitely got far worse with school. She gave me several pieces of advice, most of which I really already knew, but it’s easier to take that kind of thing to heart when it’s a doctor who tells you. She reminded me of the importance of taking time for myself, even if it means falling behind on everything else. She had some advice for fixing my sleep schedule – frankly, it’s the same advice she always gives me, which never quite works – and recommended that I drop a class next term to reduce my workload, since I’m already planning on taking at least one extra semester to complete my degree. In short, I’m lowering my personal expectations, dropping a class, rearranging my priorities, and reassessing my approach.
2016 has been a long damn year, and the last four months have been a long damn term. A lot of the stress has been beyond my control, and there’s no reason that a lot of those things will change just because the calendar does, but there’s still some comfort in the illusion of a fresh start. It would be foolish to be purely optimistic about 2017, since the world is going in some bad directions. But I’m hoping to do better for myself, at least in all the ways that I can exercise some control over. And when I’m a little steadier on my feet again I’m hoping to do more to help the world, too. I hope your 2016 was easier than mine and I hope your 2017 looks bright. If we all work together, maybe 2018 won’t look quite so grim.