Mental Health at WK

I’ve been back at Waterford for a week, and I’ve been struggling to come up with a topic to write about. I’ve been here helping with orientation, so I could write about that from the perspective of an IB2, but I covered that a lot at the start of last year. I could talk about how I’m managing deadlines and workload but that’s not very interesting and frankly, I should be working on said workload rather than writing about it. Instead, I decided to write about something that’s been a long time coming. I’ve talked about feeling overwhelmed and feeling homesick, but I’ve not really approached the topic directly. Here goes. This might be long and a bit stream of conscious- y, but it’s mostly for me. 

For a good part of the last year, I’ve been pretty depressed. I’ve talked about it with friends, and I’ve made jokes about it, but I don’t think I’ve talked about it as fully as I could have. I was worried about being self-pitying. I didn’t want to annoy people. Others have it worse. What’s causing it? I have a great life. I’m still ashamed about it. I should try harder. I should smile more, get more exercise, eat healthier, make more effort with my friends.

When I was fourteen, travelling in South Africa with my family, I became depressed for the first time. My memories of South Africa are still somewhat foggy, and I mostly remember a persistent sense of numbness and a lot of time spent lying in bed, lights off. My mother jokes I travel the world on my stomach and it’s true – I can talk about meals from every country I’ve been with near photographic recall. The tastes of South Africa are also hazy – I remember some curries, the sweetness of peaches after months in the Indian Ocean, but not much else. My parents helped bring me out of that time slowly but surely. In the Atlantic Ocean, on the tiny island of St Helena, I walked donkeys and swam through deep blue water and drank thick chocolate milkshakes and stayed up late. It felt like waking up after a six month nap.

When I was sixteen, starting school back in Canada, I started feeling numb again. The days were short. My backyard stayed the same. My classmates couldn’t compare to coral reefs and dolphins and fresh mangoes. What I remember most was conversations with my parents in the car. They would say something, I would think of something that I would normally respond with – and I wouldn’t say anything. The act of agreeing that the weather was lovely, or voicing my opinion on what we should make for dinner felt monumental. I stopped talking. Food didn’t taste like anything. I felt trapped in my head, and it was not a nice place to be. I tried counselling for the first time that winter. It taught me some valuable skills, but I think what brought me out of that depression was just time.

At the end of term one of my first year at Waterford, I got sick with mono. I didn’t know that was what it was at the time, I just got sick and didn’t really get better. I stopped going to the caf for dinner, falling asleep straight after lessons ended most days. I lived in my sweatpants. When I got home for the break, my doctor diagnosed me, and told me to sleep as much as I could. By this point, I had started to feel numb again. I don’t know whether it was the combination of exhaustion, withdrawal from my friends, homesickness, or just my brain being out of whack.  When I got back to Waterford, things felt better for a little while, before I started to slip under again. My general anxiety ramped up and I couldn’t sleep. To be honest, term three is mostly a blank. When I got home, I saw my doctor to discuss options.

At this point, I had sort of gotten used to being depressed. I didn’t like the person I was, but I sort of figured it was part of getting older. I was lethargic, numb, despondent, and unmotivated. I knew I couldn’t really get through another year at Waterford like this, so after talking to my doctor and my parents, I made the decision to start antidepressants.

Antidepressants aren’t a cure all. The one I’m on takes six weeks or longer to kick in, and it doesn’t mean that I can stop practising all my healthy habits like mood check ins, meditation, or mindfulness. At first, I was a bit hesitant at the idea. It felt like giving in and saying I wasn’t strong enough to fix myself. Eventually, I’ve realised that I’m just giving my brain something it lacks. I take iron tablets because I have low iron. On a hot day, I drink electrolyte drinks to replace what my body sweats away. For me, an antidepressant is the best way I can help myself right now.

It’s really hard at a UWC at the best of times, and I’ve been struggling a lot more than I’ve let on in this blog. Part of that comes down to shame, part of it is because I didn’t feel it was super relevant, and part of it is just because I had more interesting things to write about. However, for those of you who read my blog because you’re interested in UWC, I feel like I should be honest about the struggles that can come with it.

This was longer than I meant it to be. That’s ok. I’m still figuring things out.