#i had an absolutely awful work schedule doing an unpaid internship and working to make like actual money on weekends

[purpleparrot]

looking back i really cannot believe i survived college

[academla]

Update

Hey guys! Thought I would post a new update. For new followers, if you exist, I’m mostly inactive here, but I will periodically post comprehensive updates on various areas of my life (academics, money, mental health, etc.). Guys, my life has been CRAZY busy!

Academic

I’m taking five courses, three on campus and two online. So far, I’ve been maintaining A’s, but my honors ethics seminar is going to be the death of me, I swear. The amount of reading, higher-level thinking, and work for that class is the most intense I’ve experienced. In a way it’s good, because it’s the first time I’ve been seriously challenged in an enjoyable and productive way (statistics does not count, because that professor was awful). Deep down I enjoy it, even though it’s buried under layers of saltiness and resentment of all these philosophers for writing such damn long essays.

My current courses are:

Abnormal Psychology

Classics of Children’s Literature

Honors Ethics & Society

Child Psychology (online)

History of World Civilizations Before 1500 (online)

I’ve been right up to the deadlines in all of these classes (if you keep reading, you’ll get an earful of my schedule) but so far managing the stress and workload reasonably well. I enjoy some stress, honestly. I like when things are fast-paced.

I also met with my advisor today. Great news: I only have four more courses and one 1-credit seminar left to take next semester before I can get my Associate’s. The classes I have signed up for are:

Psychology of Personality

Research Methods

General Biology (online and on-campus lab)

History of World Civilizations After 1500 (online)

Interdisciplinary Weekend (not sure what the topic is yet)

The end is slightly in sight. I can’t believe I’m almost 3/4 of the way to my first degree! So exciting. Which brings me to my next topic...

College

My default is UMass Amherst. I’m in the Commonwealth Honors College, and the community college to state school process is basically a smooth transition with guaranteed acceptance. Additionally, there are a lot of research opportunities, labs, etc. which is good for me being a psych major interested in research.

However, I’d still like to potentially try for a private school. I probably won’t get the money I need, but hey, it never hurt to try. In 2015, I got into Simmons College and fell in love with it. I got the highest merit scholarship possible, but we couldn’t afford it. I’d still like to apply there again, on the off chance that I could get the money I need.

I’ve also been in contact with people at Northeastern. I hadn’t considered it until I went to a transfer fair at my community college. They have a neat co-op program and are in the city, which is nice.

I was waitlisted at Brandeis in 2015, and I’m waiting to talk to people from there as well, because I might consider looking into that. My intro and abnormal psych professor suggested Wellesley. It looks quite competitive, though one advisor I met with said she thought I could get in with my transcript... but I don’t know. It honestly all boils down to money. If anyone is familiar with Massachusetts schools, please feel free to email me academlastudyblr@gmail.com with your weigh-ins and suggestions, or any contacts that you think could help advise me in this process. I’d appreciate it for sure!

Work

Ah, good old work. Well. We know I’m struggling all day every day financially. Luckily, I’ve been making about $50 per month with school and life costs. Which is better than just losing money all month.

I’m currently working two jobs. I work at the preschool full days (8-6) on Fridays, and I’ve started working mornings when I can as well, especially since we’ve lost 5 teachers there in the past month and they really need me. I’m a writing peer tutor so I tutor 2-4 Monday through Wednesday. Additionally, I’m starting an unpaid internship which will be Wednesday mornings. Altogether, my schedule is cram-jammed full of work, and I’m constantly moving around, but I don’t mind it. It’s exhausting, absolutely, but... well, it’s money. I need it. I also babysit on weekends when I can. And do school on top of that.

It sounds like a lot, I guess. It doesn’t feel like too much though. I mean, it does, but like I said, I’m managing. I’m also repeating myself. I’ve been trying to sleep as much as I can, and I’ve been doing a relatively good job, all things considered.

Mental health

I’ve had a couple breakdowns, but that’s it, this semester. One was an intense anxiety attack brought on by a pop quiz announcement (come to find out my professor never gave the quiz, and it wasn’t really a ‘quiz,’ it was optional) and the other was triggered by a presentation on eating disorders and the ED unit in abnormal psych. I persevered.

With the anxiety attack, my professor told me that I didn’t need to worry about class and I was doing well (ha! This is that hellish ethics seminar. I’m dying) and I was able to move on from that. With the ED stuff...

It’s still been hard. In times of stress, the ED voice comes back. I have been eating, because I need food to fuel my busy days, and I’d rather be nourished and not look the way I want but be successful than fall back into a trap in which I’m miserable, unhealthy, and would eventually end up in the hospital again, which is totally counterintuitive to my academic endeavors.

The presentation was particularly triggering, and there were a lot of tears. I skipped the next class with permission, because it was going to be a continued lecture on EDs. I emailed my prof helplessly because I tried to study the ED chapter and just fell apart.

But I rallied, somehow, and I managed to get through it all, kick ass at overcoming my triggers and ED voice, and ace the test. That’s a victory! I am getting stronger every day, even though I struggle.

Social

There have been boys here and there, like glimmers of potential which quickly faded, but my love life is as always nonexistent. As if I would have time to date now anyway.

I’ve got friends and nobody seems to be particularly hostile towards me in my classes. I rarely hang out. My socializing usually primarily involves homework, studying, and food.

I’ve only just returned to Snapchat, so hit me up edye327. Anyway, obviously I’ve been inactive here, and it’s oddly nice.

For awhile, this was my life. I had nothing else to take up my headspace, so toxic dramas with internet people did. Now, I could care less about online dramas and people and stress. Ain’t nobody got time for those hijinks when I’m working my ass off in real time and real life for real money and real ambitions!

Financial

This has already basically been covered, but yeah, doing okay financially. Not losing money, which is really the best I could hope for. I’m relying on full time work during the winter to boost my bank account some more.

I rarely pleasure shop. My money goes towards:

School payments

Food

Medical copays

Exciting things like shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, etc.

Freecycle has been fantastic! I’ve gotten so much awesome free stuff there and probably saved like $100 by now. I asked for correction tape, and ended up getting like 10 of them plus a set of highlighters the woman kindly threw in.

I’m trying to declutter, and I sold one of my calculators online, which was incredibly helpful money-wise. I’m ransacking my room slowly but surely to try and give away or sell items. Like I said, my Zazzle shop is pretty meager income (I need $50 to even get paid; I have made $25 in the past over a year lol) but like I also said, every penny counts. Eventually I’ll hit the threshold, hopefully.

If you read all the way through to the end, send me a photo or screenshot on the Snapchat of this post ;) or reply to this with your favorite kind of candy. Or just like it, or reblog it, or do absolutely nothing.

Thanks for all your support. Hope my update has been somewhat inspiring or at least remotely interesting to you!

Love, Edye

[rachie-neyiea]

Saw something that reminded me that it’s been about a year since my absolute lowest emotional point, and I figured I’d reflect on it a little because the then versus the now is... really different.

So basically around a year ago I was near the very end of my first try at consolidation, the very last step before writing my licensing exam. I was in a mental health placement, which was exactly what I had wanted, and I was even at my first choice hospital. It wasn’t the specific unit I wanted and I’d had a few up and downs but overall I felt pretty good about how I was doing, even if I’d made a few slip-ups along the way. And then my preceptor told me that when my time was up she wasn’t sure if she would be able to pass me because she didn’t think I had progressed enough to take on a full patient load.

I was just dumbstruck. I had a handful of scheduled shifts left when she told me this. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to even comprehend that I hadn’t been doing as well as I thought I had. I cried in the conference room that she’d taken me into, and she sort of sent me away with the dietician on staff to take part in a different activity so that I would be off the floor and could calm down. She told me that they would give me extra time, and that I could go over the 320 hours that I had to work for consolidation so that I could reach a point where she felt comfortable passing me. But now that the possibility of failure had been brought up I couldn’t get it out of my head.

So much, if not all, of my suicidal ideation has been linked to the thought of failure. The first time I really started seriously considering it was before I went back to school. I had just finished almost six months at an unpaid internship and I wasn’t getting anywhere in my job search and it was becoming very apparent to me that nothing was progressing. Nothing was going the way I had planned. I didn’t have the energy to do what I loved anymore. I didn’t have the energy to keep searching for scarce job postings. So I told myself that I was going to get a part time job and try to get back into school, and if I didn’t get accepted, I would kill myself.

There’s this feeling that I have that if I don’t succeed, I don’t really mean anything. That if I don’t do something useful then why even bother. I think that some of those feelings are why I was able to get the marks that I did when I did get back into school, because there was always the idea that if I failed a test or an exam, or didn’t get the grades that I thought I needed to get, that I wouldn’t really have a choice but to end it. These feelings would get really bad during my final year, where I would be studying so hard for tests and feel so stressed by my program and like no one in the administration really cared about the students that I would have recurring thoughts about jumping from the top of one of the buildings during a peak bus time, so that a lot of people would witness it. There was the urge behind that to be remembered, I guess, so that when an email was sent out by the college saying that I had passed and that the flags would be lowered at half mast people would know that I hadn’t just been tragically hit by a car or something.

Anyways. Suddenly being confronted by the idea that I could fail when I had worked so hard and had gotten where I wanted just made me sink further into that sort of ideation. I cried at home, I cried in the bathroom on breaks, I cried while at the nursing station. I started thinking that if this happened, if I did fail, I was going to have no other choice, and it felt so final. I’d never been so cornered by that thought process before. I had a difficult time talking to anybody about even the fact that I wasn’t doing well, let alone the thoughts suddenly filling up my waking hours. I was trying to stay positive but every time I walked into the hospital I just couldn’t feel good about it anymore, and I just became worse, making mistakes I wouldn’t have made before. I told myself that if my preceptor asked me how I was doing I would tell her, I would tell her that I was thinking about killing myself, but I just couldn’t bring myself to say it unless she asked, and she never did.

Finally it got to be so bad that during one of my lunch breaks I sent a huge text to my best friend, who I had told about some of the more difficult parts of my consolidation, asking if I could call her that night and why I needed to talk to her and honestly that was one of the best decisions I ever made in regards to my own mental well being. One of the only phone conversations we’ve ever had and it lasted for more than an hour and both of us cried multiple times. It felt so good to tell someone what I was feeling and that I’d been having thoughts like this, though not at this intensity, for years. After that I felt like I could at least tell my parents that I wasn’t doing very well, and I told myself I would at least try to finish.

I pushed myself so hard to finish.

But I was working a night shift and everything was awful and I could. Not. Take it anymore so I emailed my clinical instructor to tell her I couldn’t do it any more and I called my dad crying at three in the morning while on my break because I just couldn’t stand the way I felt and how much I was slipping up and I knew I needed to stop and get out of there because being in that environment was only making me worse.

I had a meeting with my program coordinator, and we got set up so that I could stop and start again somewhere else, and I told my preceptor that I wouldn’t be coming back via text. She called me, and we talked a bit, I never told her how I’d felt.

It’s weird. How even though I was surrounded by actual mental health professionals every time I went into that hospital I never felt comfortable telling any of them what I was going through. I’d spent around 300 hours there at that point. I think that experience also just caused me to lose a lot of faith in the profession too.

No one ever seemed to notice when I was crying in the nursing station. Or at least, they never asked me about it.

If someone had just asked me how I was doing, I wonder what would have happened. 

In any case. I started a new consolidation in September. Not what I thought I wanted, but something that I could probably do. The nurses were nice, my preceptor was easy to talk to, I even admitted to her that I had done a consolidation before and that it hadn’t gone well. This time around was different. By my midterm I was almost at a full patient load, by the end I felt good enough about how I had done there that I left a cover letter and resume with the manager, and she told me that I could call her after I’d written my exam and she’d let me know if there were any positions open. 

Sometimes what you think you want isn’t actually what’s best for you.

It’s about a year after what was the scariest point in my life, and while it’s not like I haven’t thought about death since then I am doing a lot better overall. I passed my licensing exam, I have a job at my second consolidation, I’m doing pretty well, I’ve made some cool new friends, I have things I think I can look forward to, I’m leaving my part time minimum wage job soon so that I can focus on my career.

I feel more open to talking about what I’m going through and what I went through, and honestly if I learned nothing else from that terrible period it’s that being able to talk about stuff like that is so much better for me.

Things are pretty good right now. 

This is just... So much text and it just barely covers everything but last year I felt helpless and like there was no hope for me and as I am now I’m happy.

A lot can change over a year. I hope that I can keep taking better care of myself. Maybe someday I’ll try to go back into mental health, maybe I won’t. I think a lot of my drive to go into that field was to help people like myself. In my profession empathy versus sympathy is a huge thing; it’s important to be able to feel what others feel, not just know how they feel. Maybe someday that fact that I’ve been through this will help me reach out to and help someone going through something similar.

And I know that if I ever see someone struggling I’m going to ask them if they’re doing okay. Because sometimes what you’re going through is too scary to bring it up without someone asking first, or you think it’ll be used against you, or you think people will say you’re saying it for attention or for them to go easy on you. Maybe someday I’ll be the sort of person that someone can trust with this kind of information, just like I trusted my best friend.