The D word. Depression. Repressor. Depression is an oppressor. Stuck in an environment with no room to expand, broaden, brighten your horizons, it will progressively encompass every facet of your being. It rears it’s ugly head in the silent, in between moments when the roaring tide makes way to calmer seas, and thrusts you right back into a mental whirlwind—a swirling abyss. The self-isolation begins to descend, estranging you from any color or vibrancy, hibernating the brain, the body, and the soul into a mundane spectrum of gray. It is a dark umbrella of storm clouds, a burlap bag of rusted chains, a bell jar placed over one’s essence. Often times it seems inexplicable, leaving you incapable of a rationalization; time has no tangible quality… Other times the knowledge of what efforts could be made to ameliorate the suffering only generates more. Self-loathing for a lack of vitality, for the precious moments that are instead experienced as muted.
There is a particular brand of fear involved. All of the sudden there is this secret you have to swallow every morning when you open your eyes. Sleep becomes ultra precious, an escape from consciousness. Waking up with the same itch that refuses to be scratched, as it poisons the figment of every thought produced. The itching is like a fuse, dangling itself along until it an explosion is imminent. I make eye contact with peers, and I could scream, bellow, shriek… languish the surrounding faces with the hymns of my anxiety; wondering how not a shred of perception or empathy could be produced to notice my agony.
I wrote this excerpt during the second semester of my senior year in high school. Unbeknownst to those around me, except for my parents and older brother, I was waist deep in an encounter with what is clinically defined as “a depressive episode”. This time in my life was supposed to be momentous. Instead, I was bogged down by the anxiety of recruitment camps for soccer at elite academic institutions, studying for SAT subject tests, and feeling alienated from my peers and the place I lived in. I was at my lowest weight ever, thinking that my ability to manipulate my body into its skinniest form would make me happy. I had discerned over the course of my burgeoning womanhood that thinness would make me feel okay about my sexuality, my worthiness, and my position in the world.
The climax of my depression manifested in a panic attack at a recruitment camp for soccer at Carnegie Mellon in October of my senior year. I remember participating a drill where we were shooting from distance. I shot and hit the ball just over the net and went to retrieve my ball. When I bent over to pick up the ball back like I had so many times before, this time I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a destructive vertigo. Nearly toppling against the spinning turf, I wanted to succumb to the force of weakness and collapse to the ground. Instead, I managed to pick up the ball, place it on the ground like so many thousands of times I had done before, and dribbled back through to the line once again. I stood and wondered if among all these young women trying to prove their worth athletically if I was the only one crumbling under the pressure of more than just the frigid autumn air.
It would take another college visit, this time to Haverford and Swarthmore, for me to descend to the lowest lulls of this extended biochemical rupture in my life. My father and I had planned a visit to the Philadelphia art museum, a place that on prior occasions had made me feel as though the world was an expansive place. Walking through a room full of medieval artifacts, I choked back tears, unable to repress the depths of my despair. A heightened sense of guilt and worthlessness upended me. The one place on earth that should make me feel carefree only highlighted just how defective I felt, how my world was spiraling into the blunted opacity of a black hole.
I remember the day I “threw in the towel”. The day I decided I couldn’t fix my depression with any amount of therapy, meditation, mileage, healthy eating, sleeping, or love and concern from my parents. I admitted my defeat. I was helpless and alone, crippled by bouts of crying when I would return home from school. I saw how the burden my constant state of distraught was slowly sucking the color out of the faces of my parents. I could no longer resist the appeal of a pharmacological remedy.
It took a couple of weeks to see the results of a low dose SSRI on my affect, but it took away the acuity of my anxiety and fear. The paralyzing dark cloud no longer snuck up on me. While the depths of my emotional lows were diminished, the highs were also dishearteningly muted. Receiving the award of Salutatorian for my class, dancing at prom with my date and best friend, getting the acceptance letter to Haverford the day after winning the first round of Florida State Cup with my teammates all felt diminished. I found myself asking, “Is that all there is?” The episode of depression may have been abated but something in me still felt diminished. I felt deficient. How, at age 18, do you grieve the heartbreak of your own capacity for joy?
Freshman year at Haverford was as much easier as it was harder. It felt as though I had to be overjoyed and thriving in everything that I was doing. When I found myself in a position of physical and psychological burnout by mid-October of that first semester, an ankle injury from soccer and the weight of proving myself as a chemist, a panic attack in the 8×10 dimensions of my Gummere room drove me to ask for help again. The paralysis of anxiety left me in my twin bed crying, wondering how I was ever going to get my work done, how I would get myself to have enough energy to get to practice and make it through another session on a flimsy ankle and an even flimsier resolve. Asking for help was easier this time, but handling the shame I felt for experiencing what I had framed as my fall from grace had no clear prescription. The stigma I experienced in response to encountering a mental health lull lacked a tangible manifestation. It remained unexpressed through reflection or action, internalized in my own physical and psychological suffering.
Fast forward through another hard spring semester interpersonally and on the field. After spending a tough but rewarding summer working in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a mental health advocacy group, I had the expectation of jumping into my sophomore year and actualizing all the goals I felt I had failed to obtain my freshman year. I would win a starting spot in the center midfield, find happiness in singledom and fulfilling-facade of hookup culture, and take biology by the balls to fulfill my destiny of becoming a kick-ass scientist extraordinaire. Cue the record skip sound effect here…. When I decided I needed to take a step back from soccer after the brutal health and bodily demands after the preseason of my sophomore year, my second wave of college identity stress boiled over.
Instead of feeling on top of the world, I found myself feeling more out of shape and out of touch on the field than ever before. Choosing to walk away from soccer estranged me from my social circle and identity as “varsity soccer player”. I felt more alone in my experience and exceedingly resistant to the way that my stress was commandeering my life. But the largest low of my young life also represents the greatest potential I ever had for growth and self-determination.
My sophomore year, I met my best friend. I walked onto the track team. I learned how to hurdle for the first time in my life. I then faced my fear and self-doubt and raced against girls with years of experience. I did some of my most gutsy writing and intellectual work. I received my lowest grade of college for working the hardest I ever had at anything in the class that was supposed to determine if I was cut out to major in Biology. I still declared in that major despite my self-doubt and humiliation.
I share my story not as an act of voyeurism, not to out myself, but to speak to the lack of a space for self-care and self-reflection provided by the Haverford. While Haverford has expanded and enabled my intellectual growth and allowed me to come into myself as a thinker, I also observe in my own experience and the experience of my friends and peers that it has estranged many of us from a part of our essential humanness.
When I didn’t secure an epic and flashy NSF grant last summer to conduct neuroscience research, I thought the very earth might implode beneath me. While sophomore year had felt like a success, the prospect of a summer at home, having no so-called “productive” activities toted to all of my greatest fears and insecurities. I imagined myself descending deeply into depression through crippling self-rumination and loneliness due to the many thousands of miles between my friends and me. Instead, I came away from those three months with some of the most invaluable self-knowledge and internal tools confront any situation or stress life might throw my way.
This summer, I learned to be bored. I read bell hooks and Andrea Dworkin. I slowed down. I confronted my insecurities. I felt lousy and bored a lot of the time. I had the most productive therapy of my life. I spent invaluable time with my mom and dad. I cooked and journaled and did endless hours of yoga and swimming. I pieced my heart back together. I reconnected with high school friends. I saw and was deeply affected by the Civil Rights Memorials in Birmingham and Montgomery Alabama. I watched the Olympics. I learned the value in being able to approach my inner narrative with curiosity instead of reactiveness. I descended deeply into myself and remain more grounded in who I am as result.
My narrative hints at the vast scope of the mental health and illness problem at Haverford. I beckon the Haverford community to respond to several questions: What are the barriers to help seeking? How can we address the problem of mental health and illness from cultural and structural approaches? How can we use the Haverfordian model our community was built upon to our advantage to tackle the problem in our one-of-a-kind community?
In disowning the difficult stories of ourselves we make them mutually exclusive to who “we really are”. Being mentally unwell is a rupture from how we are allowed to and supposed to act in our community in response to others and ourselves. The stigma of encountering mental health issues in our productivity-obsessed/value deterministic community directly hinders our ability to integrate all of our experiences. Wherever our life experiences fall along the continuum of painful, mundane and phenomenal, integrating each one is essential to cultivating our wholeness as people.
Without the ability to communicate the need for help in moments of difficulty, the preexisting structures that are intended to help us when we need it—CAPS, Access and Disability Services, Health Services, the Office of Academic Resources, the Offices of Deans, and professor support—are rendered useless. The structures that are intended to empower, founded upon providing students the tools for their well being, instead become a source of disempowerment. By holding the view that the integral parts of each other are only the productive, happy ones that do a million things with unlimited rigor and a smile, the discourse of the mental illness is de-legitimized based on the identity of “mentally ill” alone. The overwhelming emphasis on positivity and productiveness then further invalidates the ability of students who feel otherwise to advocate for themselves. In sharing the whole of my own story, the one that integrates the shame, vulnerability, fear, anxiety, and need, personally I am better able to have a healthy existence at Haverford. But as a community member, I will remain troubled until open dialogues are had about how campus structures and culture diminish the wholeness of the college experience. Grounding the conversation about mental health and illness in our own stories and experiences will enable each other to accomplish our responsibilities and fulfill our intellectual and emotional desires as Haverford students.