By: Anonymous
It’s a beautiful morning on George Mason University’s campus. The sun is shining, a light breeze is blowing, students walk by laughing and smiling, but all I feel is dread. With tunnel vision and tears in my eyes, I walk forward, my head hanging down. I’m on the phone, whispering, “I’m so tired, I haven’t slept well in three days.”
“It’s almost over, babe,” My boyfriend says, his voice is even but I can hear the concern masked in it. “Can’t you just skip today?”
“No,” I say, and it’s a firm answer. “You know I can’t skip.”
I am a senior in college and for the past three years, I have been struggling heavily with a menagerie of mental illnesses – such as anxiety and depression and mixed together with a strong craving for perfection and the feeling that I’m never quite good enough.
Today is the final day of Mason’s sorority recruitment process, and the aforementioned mental mixture made this ordinary weekend an extraordinary ordeal. It’s a weekend advertised as being full of fun times, but for me it meant sleep deprivation, hunger, a sore body and a constant feeling of anxiety.
Walking into the Johnson Center, the heart of Mason’s campus I am greeted with a cacophony of different sounds – coughing, laughing, shouted commands, whispers and rapid footsteps all around the room. I meander my way over to my little who is sitting on the floor, calmly eating a bagel. She gives me a withering look and pats the floor next to her.
“Almost done,” She says in a flat voice. “How did you sleep?”
“Not at all,” I say.
She and I are tired, because she and I are not built for a weekend like this. Some of the girls in the room, they live for this shit. They thrive on it, but every day drags on for me and every night is long and restless. I am the level of exhausted where you’re just too tired to sleep.
The reality of the situation of sorority recruitment for me is that I enjoy it, but I do not handle it well. It’s a fun time, with friends, chanting, sisterhood and the excitement of a new year, but I am not able to fully bask in it.
When I joined a sorority, two years ago, I was in the darkest place I had ever been. I was barely going to class because I didn’t have the energy or the motivation. I ate one meal a day, if that, lay in bed for hours on end, neglected my homework and neglected my friends. I can’t really say there was an awakening where I changed my life and I healed and I came out of the dark place, because in reality it doesn’t happen like that. What really happened was that I became a person people did not like to be around, and that made me spiral even further into the depression I was in and I became sick of myself.
Related: Addressing Mental Health on College Campuses
So, I decided to give it my all and get involved on campus and while it did not cure me of my illness, it changed me fundamentally as a person. This is the story I tell every year at sorority recruitment, to try and tell the new girls what the sorority means to me.
While it is a wonderful story and it makes me cry to think about how far I’ve come, it is not the whole story. I am a different person than I was two years ago – I am involved on campus, I hold a position in my sorority, have tons of friends, have two internships and work 32 hours a week. In anyone’s eyes, I am in my prime. However, I still struggle to get through basic necessities like sorority recruitment, and sometimes, on my worse days, even going to class.
I was not the way I am until I started college, and I know I am not alone. Hundreds of thousands of Mason students struggle every day just as I do, with smiles on their faces and their resumes filled with their involvement. We’re your student ambassadors, we’re your cashiers at the bookstore, we’re walking past you on campus and smiling, we’re teaching your classes, we’re your classmates. Mental illness is one of the easiest things to hide, and it’s a plague on college campuses nationwide.