Tuesday, October 11, 2016

self-possession

I seem to have forgotten the therapeutic effect that Town Green has. Just the breeze, the sky, soft strums of the guitar (thank you random dude), occasional chatters, and the lively scene at Starbucks - it's almost picture perfect.

The past few weeks have been rough, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. Not because of anything that happened externally, but it was really a struggle within myself. I have never felt this way before. Anyone who knows me - you don't even need to be a close friend - will know that I'm quite the happy-go-lucky girl. It's not really a facade that I put up; work and academic matters just don't get to me. And before you think that it's because I'm an overachiever, I'm not. I'm not doing incredibly well, probably average, but it just doesn't seem to trouble me.

So the past few weeks, I really hit rock bottom. I was completely unmotivated, I felt so horrible about myself, I felt like a letdown, like I was wasting my time and my parents' hard-earned money being in school. Yet I couldn't find it within me to pull everything back together again. Some days I felt like crying over minute issues, other days I felt nonchalant about everything going on and most days I really just wanted to huddle in bed and stay alone. Yet I felt so guilty feeling like that.

I'm thankful for people who stayed around and accompanied me, but it was also then that I realised this was very much my own struggle to overcome. It was also when I realised that when I tell people "it's all in the head", it might not be as helpful as I thought it to be. I know that it was all in my head, but I just couldn't fix it even though I tried. And trust me I tried so hard - I sat myself down at my desk, at ERC, at CLB, at the lounge, just to focus on my work, but I couldn't. I tried to bring myself to exercise, to pull myself away from my room, but nothing made me feel better. And that simply exacerbated my sense of guilt.

Perhaps I was tired, perhaps I had too much piling on my plate - but these hypotheses didn't stand because I know that I have been in worse scenarios the past semesters and they didn't get to me like how these few weeks did.

Things are improving, I'm started to feel more like myself again, by God's grace. It's been a terrible few weeks, scary to say the least. But through it all, I think I have learnt to better empathize with people and recognize that different people have different struggles, even if it's not something that I personally find difficult to handle. I have understood how one can still feel so lonely, helpless and afraid even when you have encouraging friends around. I'm just glad that I've (somehow) passed this stage and regained strength :)

This is a really lengthy post but I thought it's good for me to pen my thoughts and emotions down.