My Unruly Brain
My senior year of college, my brain decided to go on strike. This was definitely an inconvenient time for it to do so — I had classes to finish, research projects to undertake, jobs to apply for, and major life decisions to make. But my neural processes decided to shut down shop. My attention span went on vacation and so did my memory and my ability to process what was going on around me. Numbers in particular refused to cooperate with me — having to do mental math or memorize even a small sequence of numbers, such as a flight time, was enough to reduce me to tears.
It got so bad I began wondering if I had dyscalculia or maybe ADD. Something was seriously wrong with me, I thought in those rare moments I could hold a serious thought for longer than two minutes without zoning out. I went as far as getting an evaluation from a Learning Specialist through my school.
My official diagnosis? Too much anxiety and depression. I didn’t need a learning specialist to tell me I had that, thank you very much.
What I didn’t know was that having mental illness for a long period of time, especially starting at a young age like I did, could also impede the development of your executive functioning skills. “Executive function” is a blanket term for a number of skills you need to perform complex tasks, such as working memory, self-control, maintaining focus, adapting to changing circumstances and processing information quickly. My brain decided to yeet all those things out the window in favor of being anxious all the time.
To explain why executive function works differently for someone with a mental illness than it does for a neurotypical person, let’s use the analogy of a phone battery. If you have your phone on battery-saver mode throughout the day, you’ll still have power to make an important phone call late in the afternoon when you need it. If you have a dozen different apps running all the time, the battery will be drained in a couple of hours so that by the time you actually need it, the phone is dead. My anxious brain always has a thousand different apps/streams of thought going — one about how everyone around me secretly hates me, one about how my future is an endless black void with no potential, one saying if I don’t complete my essay immediately I’m going to fail out of college, etc. etc. By the time I need to do something important, I don’t have any juice left and the sound of my background thoughts is too loud to actually focus.
I was furious when I found out about my executive dysfunction, which was so bad I tested on the charts for ADHD. I was furious at the nebulous personification of mental illness, which had been ruining my life for nearly a decade through mood swings as twisting as Kingda Ka, and had now found another way of ruining everything for me. My academic performance being affected was especially painful because for so long I was labeled by myself and others as “the smart kid” (the implications of that can be unpacked in another essay). Hell, I even maintained an astronomically high GPA throughout high school while being depressed out of my mind. If I no longer had my academic performance going for me, what else was there of value left in me?
I was also furious because nobody had told me this was a common effect of mental illness before. I did not learn about it in my AP Psych class, in any other class, or from most of my wonderful therapists. It’s bad enough mental illness is not talked about openly but what information we do have available to us is often incomplete. I spent over a year of my life thinking I was stupid and lazy; I can’t imagine how many others must be in a similar situation to me.
However, my trip to the learning specialist offered some hope. While I was there, I breezed through math exercises and memory problems. Initially, I was humiliated; I thought my evaluator would think I had made everything up for attention and was wasting her time. Once she assured me that she did not, in fact, hate me, I felt euphoric hope. All the skills I thought were gone to me forever were in fact still there, just dormant under the weight of my constant anxieties. The difference was that in the office of the sympathetic and soothing Melissa M. King, with a cup of hot tea in front of me, I was CALM. My brain was not screaming about a million different things, it was quiet. I nearly cried with relief. My brain had not been quiet for months before that.
It’s been a little over a month since that visit and I’ve been slowly working on getting better. I’m trying to meditate. I’m working on dealing with the things that send my brain into overdrive. And I’m writing this.
This is partially a confession — some of you seem to think I am very put together! I am not! I constantly have only a tenuous grip on my life’s direction! Also if you’re one of my professors reading this, this is why all the work I turned in at the end of the year was garbage and I’m sorry!
But this is also a sharing of strategies. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t believe I’m the only person who was dealing with executive dysfunction as a result of mental illness without knowing about it, and I hope reading this can set off a lightbulb in someone’s brain. We are so quick to call others lazy and even quicker to call ourselves lazy and worthless when we should be examining what specifically is blocking us from accomplishing what we want to do. The smartest thing I did my senior year was trust my instinct that something was wrong and ask for help. Otherwise, I might still be spending my days calling myself stupid.