”Wow, what a dumpster fire of a year. As if finishing a Ph.D. weren’t hard enough?! Even before the pandemic, I struggled a lot with depression and anxiety. My experience with both feel intensely physical: I feel immense pressure in my chest, like a giant claw is squeezing my heart, or my hands go numb, like they aren’t part of my body, or I feel a deep, gasping emptiness in my gut. Sometimes, I feel all three at the same time.
The anxiety part really made getting help a struggle for me. Even though I KNEW that mental illness isn’t a personal failing, even though I KNEW my friends and colleagues would be immensely supportive, even though I KNEW therapy and medication works because it’s worked FOR ME in the past, I really struggled with shame and embarrassment that I was dealing with this again. And that shame transmuted into paralyzing social anxiety. At one point, I was afraid to even write down my own thoughts in my personal journal because what if in some distant future, my journal is subpoenaed and people discover all my embarrassing feelings, and then it goes viral as some Buzzfeed article about the ‘13 most embarrassing revelations in former Princeton graduate student’s journal’ and then it gets published on the front page of the New York Times, and then I get fired in public disgrace, and then all my friends and family leave me, and then I get sued for misrepresentation and lose my house, and then I’m a failure for the rest of my life? I mean, putting it down like that sounds crazy absurd, but my thinking was sufficiently disordered that I was seriously worried about this actually happening.
So what happened? Well eventually I summed up the courage to call a therapist and schedule an appointment. I got a referral for a psychiatrist and went back on antidepressants. I’ve been seeing both my therapist and psychiatrist for about a year, and it’s made a profound difference in my life. I’ve also started running recently to burn off anxiety energy. It’s not perfect, and things have definitely been exacerbated by the pandemic/forest fires/protests/murder hornets/etc, but I’m doing so much better. This time a year ago, I was ready to leave grad school to hide in a cave somewhere. This time a year ago, I was afraid to say anything. This time a year ago, I was desperate. It gets better. It’s not easy, but it gets better.”
