#I'm about to defend my bachelor thesis soon

[ritelli-draws]

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[leopardom]

i've been listening to everybody's waiting and best year of my life on loop since they got released last midnight and oh boy the feeling i get from both songs is quite heavy but also... liberating??

why heavy? well, last year was anything but the best year of my life. it pretty much started with me realising (with some help) that i had fallen in love and, long story short, i got my heart broken very badly. at the same time, my mental health was deteriorating and as a result i started closing up and also lost one of the closest people to me. we're in good terms now, but never talked about what happened and we drifted apart like that. and it's been almost a year ever since

while losing that close connection with my friend proved to be helpful, the road to accepting this along with other things was very painful and i had to mask any negative feeling i had in order to keep functioning somehow and not make the rest of the people close to me uncomfortable. and i also had to focus on my thesis in order to finally get my bachelor's. and i did. but along with the new lows i had reached mentally, i reached and passed the point of burnout

my close ones were supporting me through my rants and i'll always be gratefull for that. but at the same time they still were telling me how good it would be when i'd be done with uni and how i would be able to get a proper job and make my own money and maybe do a master's etc. they all were waiting for something, they were waiting for more than i was already doing. they had been waiting for more than 3 years actually, but last year i was a lot closer to the goal and the pressure grew a lot bigger. and all the support i had was coming from a distance, i was still all by myself most of the time

from April til the beginning of July i was breaking down on a very regular basis, the panic attacks also became more frequent and my mental health was at the very bottom. and i couldn't even go to therapy anymore because i didn't have any time or energy for that. in the span of three months i had changed so much both physically and mentally that it made my head hurt and i couldn't process it

all i wanted was a hug from someone and to be told that i'll be okay. i didn't want everyone to tell me how things will be as soon as i graduate and how free i will feel yada yada. i only wanted a fucking hug, which i never got

after defending my thesis and graduating i blacked out completely. i can't remember myself feeling anything for the next couple of months. i only had a brief break when i went to Helsinki in September, attended all three of the jo finnish gigs and got to spend time with my friends in Finland. and when i got back from that trip i blacked out again. now i have a job and i make some money, but mentally i haven't recovered from the burnout and the high pressure. and people are still expecting things from me, from my students to my family to my friends to myself

lately, however, i kind of have started feeling again. my feelings are not usually nice and i cry a lot, but now there are days when i think that maybe things will get better with time and maybe i'll get there. a few months ago i didn't want to do anything at all and i was acting like a robot. now i want to do things, i'm trying as much as i can to do things that give me a serotonin boost so i won't have to rely only on my meds

to conclude, i still haven't gotten that hug i wanted so bad all these months ago. i'm not gonna lie, i still want it. but these two songs feel like that hug now. everybody's waiting is telling me that i'm not alone in this, there are people like me out there and we manage one way or another. best year of my life is telling me that i may have been and still am a mess, but you never know. maybe something different and even better is yet to come. and i have to be here to see it