Background

I have never considered myself to be a happy individual. For a significant section of my life, I have dealt with depression and anxiety disorders. I wasn’t always able to classify how I felt, and for a long time, I thought that it was completely normal. It wasn’t until Middle School that I started to notice the differences between myself and the rest of my friends. I did the best I could to fit in and just move on. And things were fairly average. I just never gave too much thought to internal processes.

During my tenure in High School, I came to terms with my mental health issues. Expectedly, I was far more perceptive to how I was really feeling. And the more I thought about it, the more I became concerned about myself. I couldn’t put reasons behind how I felt. For several days, I would inexplicably feel sick to my stomach, and everything just seemed off. The seemingly mundane things that still make you smile throughout the day did nothing for me.

And there wasn’t an end in sight. I tried distracting myself, I tried self-harm, I tried reading. Nothing helped for any period of time. For a month I would think something was helping, only to have it come crashing down.

Eventually, things did get better. I found a therapist and started resolving my issues. And most importantly, there were several people that helped me through my depression and anxiety. I ended up falling in love with one of them, and they became my long-term girlfriend. To this day, I am so thankful for everything that she did for me. She helped me find myself in a way that no one else could have. Thank you.

College

Despite my mental health shortcomings, I have always had a sense of direction. I have been interested in technology for some time, and thankfully I’ve been able to work in the field that I love.

But that all changed after attending college. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. College made me feel so defeated. And worse, it changed who I was as a person. It made me more isolated, and distant. And ultimately, college led to the fall of my relationship with that same person who helped me through so much of my life.

In retrospect, I hate the person I was for a majority of the last two years. I regret choices in both my school and personal life.

To say that I regret college is not precisely true. I regret the decisions that I have made, and my continued ignorance of college’s effect on me. I didn’t perceive any of this until three months ago. I spent all of my time analyzing everything that had gone wrong. I looked at myself and realized how much I had changed for the worse.

And of course, there are several ways in which I have grown positively while in the college environment, but none of them even begin to counter the ways that I negatively changed.

Put simply, I just wish I had seen the person that I was becoming sooner.