Dear Internet,
I'm a musical theatre major, and my teachers often emphasize how valuable a "mental health day" can be. The purpose of a mental health day is to recharge when you're feeling uninspired or not up to the challenge of a day by staying home and putting yourself first. To be honest, I've always scoffed at the idea, rolling my eyes at the people who decided to take these days to themselves instead of showing up to class, thinking they were using these days as an excuse to simply ditch. I vowed that I would never take a mental health day because I would never need one--right? Right. Or so I thought.
I woke up on a Monday and didn't want to get out of bed. Not in a lazy way--it wasn't that I wanted to snooze my alarm once again or get another hour of shut eye. It was in an oh-my-god-my-depression-is-kicking-my-ass way, the kind of feeling where the weight of the world was on my shoulders before my feet had even touched the ground. But still, I pushed on. Class will help me, I swore, and I did everything I could to make it the best day possible. I got myself a coffee and plugged in my curling iron. I put on a dress, I wanted to feel good, but as I looked in the mirror, I saw through my own perfectly primped facade. Still, I got my ass out the door and went to school. In my first class, a dance class, I felt myself holding back meaningless tears for a painstaking 75 minutes, feeling personally victimized every time my teacher gave me a caring, constructive adjustment. I began to succumb to anxious thoughts, feeling more and more worthless, emotionless, and empty as every moments passed. By the time the next class came around, another dance class, I must have looked a bit off, as one of my friends asked me to step outside with her. As she asked if I was okay, I completely unraveled, crying hysterically into the sleeve of my jean jacket and ruining the makeup I had worked so carefully on just an hour earlier. It was my first ever anxiety attack at school, and I was mortified. It became clear that class wasn't going to be a possibility for me, so my friend sat me down and rubbed my shoulders as I called the university health center. I spoke to a sing-song voiced woman who talked me off the ledge and convinced me to come to the health center in person. So I went, hysterical, and spoke to a blonde therapist who essentially told me that, in my instability, I could either go back to class or go to the hospital, since I wouldn't be stable alone in my dorm room. To be honest, I didn't really know which one to pick. The hospital sounded extreme, but I was so far from being grounded in myself that it felt like a reasonable option.
This, internet, is the definition of needing a mental health day. I never thought I would need one myself, but here I was, staring it in the face, realizing that maybe, just maybe, it was a mistake to come to school and simply stick it out. When you really need one of those coveted mental health days, "sticking it out" sounds easier than it really is. As I learned, it's almost impossible to make it through a class when the only thing you can focus on is the looming anxiety in the front of your mind. It's frustrating, it's debilitating, it's devastating, and, quite frankly, it's embarrassing. It's humiliating to feel you're losing your carefully calculated control in front of the people you love, even though, at the end of the day, they still love you right back. My overachieving self believed that the best decision was to get out of bed and show up, hoping that perhaps class would make me feel better, but unfortunately it just didn't work out that way.
But before I advocate for staying home whenever you don't feel like getting out of bed, I must say that being surrounded by people I love, even when I felt completely disconnected from them, was a nice gentle reminder that I am loved, I am valued, and I have people around me to keep me grounded when I'm feeling unstable. So do I regret getting out of bed instead of taking the mental health day I likely desperately needed? No. But I do regret the fact that I felt that taking a mental health day would've been a weak choice. On the contrary, making the decision to take a moment to focus on your own mental health is a very strong choice. It takes a lot of bravery to say that you're not okay, that something is wrong within you and that you need a second to fix it. This is something that I think a lot of college kids overlook, saying that it's "just stress" and they'll be "just fine" on their own without stopping to evaluate where they really are. It's something that I think a lot of parents and teachers overlook, too, taking their students' occasional lack of light for laziness when there's something more important going on that's being ignored.
It's time that college students start treating their mental health like it's a priority. I'm not saying that we should stop doing our homework because we feel that it stresses us out, or we shouldn't go to class because it takes away from our time to have fun. I'm saying that, if you're at the end of your rope, that last paragraph of your paper can wait for you to have a quick conversation with your roommate where you reach out and tell them that you really need someone right now. You can miss 20 minutes of your first class of the day to go and talk to a school counselor about how you're feeling and how to find the tools to work through it. You can take a break from your study sets to meditate for ten minutes, or put off cleaning your room to make cookies to share with a friend if you really need to. I propose constructive activism when it comes to our mental health. Taking a few extra steps to make sure that we are the best that we can be, so when it comes to doing that work we stress so much over, it will be its best, too.
I wish I had been told how important my mental health was earlier in my life. I grew up confusing occasionally taking much needed time for myself instead of finishing all of my work perfectly as being an underachiever, and I was praised for my excellent products by my teachers. But rarely do I remember a teacher or peer genuinely wanting to know how I was, or if I was okay. The facade was enough. But I think it's time for me to take my own advice and start focusing on my own mental health. The grades and schoolwork will eventually be behind me, and it will be get done one way or another, because it has to get done. But there's a real human being who's going to come out on the other side of it all, and she won't ever be behind me.
It's time that I start focusing on her, don't you think?
-mk.
