Dear Reader,
The following contains discussion about suicide. If this topic is sensitive or triggering for you, please approach with caution. If you are suffering with any of the aforementioned topic, please seek professional help. You are worthy of any and all help you have access to.
I’ve lived the majority of my life trying way too hard to reach the ultimate goal of “happiness.” Let me start in high school. I tried my best to get all As in high school, and when I did, I ended up taking as many AP classes as possible. Once I took as many AP classes as possible, I tried getting all As in those classes. I ended up burning out super quickly my Senior year of high school because I was prepping for 7 AP exams. Oh, and I also applied to 17 different colleges which was just a tad bit time-consuming. I got my first glimpse at being mentally ill: I would have panic attacks that did not let me leave bed to go to school in the morning. I ended up missing or being late to 13 days of school in my last semester. That number used to be a maximum of 1 per semester before my senior year.
The interesting thing is, however, that I had no idea what to do. My parents had no idea what to do. They have never really understood mental health disorders the way that so many more people do nowadays. My mom would just beg me to get up and go to school, not understanding why I couldn’t move or why I was hyperventilating. She cared about me but did not think she could do anything, so she would just give up. My dad wasn’t much better. I don’t blame either of them, but I do blame the entire stigma around poor mental health.
After graduating high school, I started at Georgia Tech in Fall of 2018. My first semester here was an absolute mess. My classes weren’t too bad, but my main issue was my social life. I did not understand how to get out of my comfort zone, and I did NOT know how to make friends. It seemed like everyone else already had friends or did not want to be my friend, which now I know was not true. Any time I had any experience that was even slightly social, I would end up overthinking that experience later that day in bed. I would just lie there at night and not be able to fall asleep until 6am because I was a victim of my own mind. I had one good friend that entire semester, and he kept me sane.
While this absolutely sucked and made me miserable, not having many friends gave me a lot of time to focus on my classes. As a result, I made some amazing grades, and to this day, my first semester at Tech was my best academically. But it was far from my best in terms of my happiness.
My second semester, Spring 2019, came and I ended up pledging to a fraternity. How I managed to do this, I do not know. Well, I do know, but I am still surprised by myself. I knew I was miserable. I knew I had one friend. I knew I had to do something. That one friend recommended I check this one fraternity out, so I ended up walking in BY MYSELF to this fraternity and met a ton of the brothers there on a random Thursday night AFTER rush was over. I still can’t believe I did that. But, as a result, I found myself coming back constantly to this place because it made me happy. All I wanted was to be happy.
I made good friends. And I was happy for a while. But my grades were awful. I just shrugged them off and figured I’ll do better in the future. Oh boy was I in for a ride.
Summer of 2019 came, and I was a FASET leader. This was also something that was extremely out of my comfort zone, but I am so glad I did it. I gave being a FASET leader my all, and I changed so much as a person. I was still happy for a while...but I did get an F and a C in the two classes I was taking.
Fall of 2019 came, and everything went to shit. Like seriously. I joined even more extracurriculars because they made me happy. Meeting new people made me happy, and I liked being happy. But my younger perfectionist self was still inside of me and desperately trying to tear me open. I still had a deep care for my grades, and my insanely low GPA cut deep into my self-esteem.
I tried my damnedest. I really, really tried. I was trying to balance my insane workload of 16 hours with the insane amount of extracurriculars I was in. It was unrealistic and had major consequences. I was already unhappy with my grades, but the middle of the semester came, and I knew I was gonna fail more than one class at this rate. My self-hatred grew and grew, and I started hating myself so much that I wanted to die everyday. It’s very tough to describe with words - the process of depression overtaking me. It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t super slow, either. It just happened.
I was already deeply flawed in the way I viewed myself, but the action of hating myself more and more every day because I could no longer say that I was good at school hurt. I wasn’t being lazy - I was so overwhelmed half of the time that my body would shut down, and I would stay in bed until 8pm, sometimes longer. I lost more and more hope. My grades were awful. This semester was going to be awful too, so why continue? I tried opening up to a few friends about how dark of a place I was in. They helped and tried their best, but depression is one hell of a demon. I think the best way to describe it is with a note I have saved in my phone from Oct 21, 2019, 5:16pm: “I try to get out of this pit but when I look up it just gets twice as deep.”
I ended up attempting suicide on the 27th of October, around 4am. I tried drinking myself to death. I ended up waking up 19 hours later, not remembering much else other than that I wanted to die.
It was surreal. I woke up, and not a single soul knew other than me. I took a shower and ate some mac n cheese and chatted with my roommates. They had no idea I could’ve died that night. Very late that night I called my best friend and confessed what I had done. I didn’t know what else to do. They asked me to see them, and they made me call counseling. I remember feeling like a zombie. I was at my absolute worst, so I was just gonna listen to this person I care about and hope I can be better. And so I did.
I ended up getting a therapist and withdrawing from all my classes that semester. Therapy was my saving grace, and I cannot recommend it more. It was not super quick, however. It took many many months of therapy to get through all of my self-hatred and emotions.
You’d think that was the climax, huh? Well, the thing that they don’t tell you about working on yourself is that progress isn’t linear. After a few months of therapy, my grades weren’t as good as I had hoped, but I passed all of my classes except one in Spring 2020. Then COVID hit. And oh boy, did COVID suck. I stopped going to therapy because I thought I was happy, even though my therapist said there was a lot more work to be done. I was in a happy relationship and thought everything was going to be okay. What ended up happening next was not very cash money.
Summer of 2020 came, and out of nowhere came more mental illness. All of a sudden, I started experiencing intrusive thoughts and some symptoms of OCD. Basically, I would be tortured by my own mind’s thoughts every single night. I’d go to bed at midnight, and I couldn’t sleep til noon that same day. It was hell. As a result, I failed a class and got a D in another. I then went into another cycle of depression that was very similar to the one I described earlier.
However, I started therapy again. I was seeing a new therapist and had a close call to attempting suicide again. But I didn’t because my therapist told me why I shouldn’t and helped me through an extremely dark time.
Getting out of this second depressive episode was not easy. I had to work really hard during and outside of therapy to get better. My progress was extremely not linear, but it was always progress. Sometimes a step backwards helps you see what’s in front of you more clearly.
My progress during and after this second episode has been extremely slow, but it has been amazing. My Fall 2020 semester and Spring 2021 semester have been some of the best in terms of my happiness. My grades still aren’t the best, but I don’t care. They make me happy enough.
I am not on top of the world, but I sure as hell am a lot better than I was in the past. There is still work to be done on myself, but I am in a much, much better place now.
I hate that it happened to me the way it did. I hate the fact that I tried so damn hard to love myself only to hate myself even if I tried hard. I hate that I didn’t get help so many times when I should have. I hate that not a lot of people know how medication can affect you. I hate that, to this day, there are still people that don’t get help because of a stigma. I hate hate hate the fact that depression can still be seen as a weakness instead of as mental illness. It makes me so angry.
If you’re reading this, please understand that your mental health is important, and that you are valid. I have tried so hard to achieve “happiness,” when happiness is something that I could’ve always had with a little bit of help. I am not gonna achieve “happiness” once I get a 9-5 job or if I am financially stable, but I CAN get it at any moment if I just work on myself in the present. I’m gonna have to work with what I have. Take what’s in front of you and try your best, because that’s all that you can do.
You and your feelings are valid. It’s okay to not be okay. And please, please reach out to a friend or someone professional if you need help. I know it may seem scary, but all they really want to do is help. I hope I can help some people by sharing what I’ve gone through.
You are not alone.
Nyimul H., Georgia Tech ‘22
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