Why I haven’t been around much | Thoughts by Erica

For months now, I have felt more like an outsider than I ever have. I feel like I am constantly crawling towards some semblance of normalcy, but I never reach it. 

I had a whirlwind summer falling in love with the most amazing girl in the world. Then school happened, and everything got harder. The stresses of school were more than I could originally bear in my first year. Eventually, all my efforts to go out trailed off.

My worries got bigger and harder to face. They consumed me. 

I could never understand why. Now I do.

I’m in the midst of being diagnosed with severe anxiety. The depression I’m experiencing is subsequent to it, or so I’m told. 

Anxiety has ruined my life. I have virtually no friends. My girlfriend is quickly losing her patience with me. I have overwhelmed my mom more than I have ever wished to. Unless I need to go out, I stay inside to try and subdue the worries in my head. 

It is a very unhappy lifestyle.

I don’t know where the anxiety came from. I assume it is in part a culmination of six years worth of working to compensate for all my other shortcomings, including being bullied and trying to accept my sexuality before I was ready to face it.

A lot of people don’t understand anxiety. If you have ever had extreme nervousness and worry before a big test or date, you can probably get an idea of how it feels. The only difference for me is that I experience those feelings on an almost constant basis; their extremities fluctuate depending on the situations I am in.

For me, social settings trigger the anxiety. That’s why I run away after class is over and decline all the invitations (albeit, there are few) I get on Facebook. I’m told avoidance and retreat are the hallmarks of anxiety. It upsets me that my first instinct is to run or flee difficult situations. 

In turn, I’ve become very lonely, spending limited amounts of time with people and excess amounts of time alone with my iPhone. Naturally, I’ve also begun to develop depression, which has manifest into late-night subway rides home, choking back tears and biting the insides of my cheeks next to complete strangers.

I’m also in the midst of trying to diagnose a stomach issue I’ve been dealing with for years. Whether or not it is related to my anxiety remains unknown for now. 

I guess the point of this post is to apologize. If I’ve ever been rude to you, turned you down, brushed you off or made you feel like less than you deserve, I am sorry. No illness is an excuse for rudeness, but I hope you can try to empathize with me. 

I also apologize for the lack of posts on here. Trying to get through this means there’s less time for me to write good, meaningful posts, ones I’m proud to publish. In the meantime, I’ve been working on some personal essays that I’m sure I’ll eventually put out. Until then, your patience is appreciated.

Take care,
Erica

Fuck | Thoughts by Erica

A lot of my friends have been making posts about their favourite and least favourite words so I decided to jump on the bandwagon. See their posts here and here.

In an effort to get to know me, Sofia once asked me what my favourite word was. I came up with a few – “industrious,” “soft,” “therefore” – but none of them were really the favourite. They were just words that sounded nice, that tickled my eardrums.

I’ve been thinking a lot about it since she asked me. I mean, the Oxford English Dictionary lists 171,476 distinct words in the English language; I apparently know 22,000 of those words (according to this site). How am I supposed to pick a favourite?

Alas (oh, that’s another word I like [because it sounds like “ass”]), after months of contemplating this at 2 a.m. when I’m up with a stomach ache and can’t fall asleep, I think I’ve finally picked one.

Fuck.

Think about it: It’s brash and curt and straight to the point. It rolls right off the tongue. Fuck. What a word!

Even better, it has to be one of the most versatile words in the language.  Here are just some ways you can use it:

When you’re angry: “FUCK!”

When you’re sad: “Fuck :(“

When you’re happy: “Fuck! :)”

When you’re surprised: “Holy fuck!”

When you have a deadline to meet: “Man, I’m totally fucked.”

When you’re at a party: “Man, I’m totally fucked.”

As a verb: “Let’s fuck.”

As an adjective: “I’m fucking tired.”

As a noun: “Go suck a fuck.”

As a unit of measurement: “I don’t give a single fuck.”

As a word to describe things you don’t know how to describe: “It was really fucking fuck.”

I have to admit that I only have fond memories of using it. I used to be the kid that would tattle-tale on my cousin for calling me “stupid” when I was in kindergarten. Today, I swear like a sailor.

The shift happened in the fifth grade, when I first got the guts to actually say “fuck” aloud in the schoolyard. All my guy friends were astonished – “Whoa!” they said. “You shouldn’t say that! Whoaaaa!” We then resumed our game of handball and I proceeded to scream “FUCK” on the top of my lungs when the bell rang. 

(I was a badass.)

It’s also the word that got Rob Ford in trouble. It’s one of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. And it led to the creation of this masterpiece. 

Basically, it is the best word ever. It evokes every emotion. It is so much packed into four little letters. It’s a 10-cent word with a 10-dollar meaning – a journalist’s wet dream.

As a writer, I work with words every day. It’s my job to make words sound nice together. But seriously, when all else fails, using “fuck” never falters. It always fits, always sounds good. 

Thank you.

Fuck.

Seventy-two | Thoughts by Erica

Seventy-two. 72. Eight times nine. 22.86 divided by 40.

The number glared back at me, sunk deep into my skin. It was 4:37 a.m., the cold medicine wore off and I was wide awake, staring at the lowest grade (to date) received at this wretched institution called Ryerson University.

Seventy-fucking-two.

I’ve been waking up at the wee hours of the morning for three days now, with a cold that just won’t go away. Cold medicine is the only thing that keeps me asleep; though, by 3 or 4 in the morning, it wears off and I’m left awake, uncomfortable and unable to get any rest at all. Instead, I grab my phone and I go through my email and my Twitter and whatever else seems fun before dawn.

(Why I decided to check my grades at 4 a.m. really speaks to my character, I think.)

I studied two days in a row. I made notes over reading week and I memorized what “socialization” meant and who Emile Durkheim was and I was so sure that I’d do well. It was a multiple choice midterm! In an introductory sociology course! And I studied! How could I fuck it up!

In all the electives I’ve taken at Rye, I’ve never received below a 90 on an exam. In fact, I wrote my last exam with a sinus cold, my temples pounding and snot running like a faucet from my nose; and I earned the highest grade in the class: 96. In my good health, it was impossible for me to expect any less this time around.

But I got to the exam with my stomach in knots and my head spinning and I found it hard to breathe in there and the lights were so damn bright and only half of the questions made any sense and I felt like I’d never even heard of half the concepts on the test. I kept flipping back and forth, frantically filling in the bubbles on my Scantron sheet, giving them my best guess. It was all so fast, and I had to get home to do the rest of my work — the rest of my work! I had so much to do! (I still do!) — and I handed it in without checking it over andthen it was over and I breathed.

I breathed.

It felt good.

I am so worked up about numbers that don’t matter. Because I tell myself that all the things I was told to hate about myself could be made up, somehow, by the constant A’s and the exclusive emails because I’m a “Ryerson scholar” and the scholarships and the smiles on my parents’ faces when I tell them I’m still a perfect 4.00. I’m average at everything else. I’m shit at a lot of other things. But school — ha! I mastered that. I was intelligent, or at least the institution told me I was.

It was an excuse. I didn’t need to be around people because I was “busy studying.” I couldn’t work a part-time job, I told my family, because it would “interfere with the degree of my academic work.” It was all bullshit. Bullshit. It was an excuse to avoid the hard stuff. I thought I was some sort of special snowflake, some scholarly princess with a gift.

But now I have a 72 eating away at me and I don’t know what to do about it.

There’s an editorial that ran in the Globe about two months agoin which an A+ student at Queen’s University says he regrets all the effort he put into doing well academically. I wonder if this is the start of that regret for me. I wonder if this B- will suddenly transform who I am. I wonder if I’ll ever be a 4.00 student again, if I’ll give up all the extra work and the dependency on marked assignments.

I wonder if I’ll learn to love myself without the word “scholar” tagged on at the end of my name.

I want to go to sleep and never wake up | Thoughts by Erica

I’ve been told by a lot of people this past week that my second year of university is when I will most doubt all my academic and future-career choices. See, first year is full of pep; third year is a lot easier, more tailored to my tastes; and fourth year is a last chance to impress before I am forced to transform into a Real-Life Adult.

But second year is a time when students, like little ol’ me, are tested, put under immense pressure to decide the fates of our futures and determine, rightinthisverymoment, who and what we want to be.

Dramatic, right?

On Friday, I stapled and submitted my Plan of Study to the journalism office at Ryerson. It’s a course intention guide of sorts, in which j-students are expected to tell the higher-ups what they want to do with their lives. No one cares if we’re 19 or if we have no sense of purpose or direction or if this dumb plan causes mild to severe angina; they just expect us to know.

There are only certain choices we can make, choices that limit our professional direction and the kinds of jobs we can take on in the future. For example, students — like me — who hope to get into the magazine stream are limited to taking only feature writing courses to guarantee spots on the magazine masthead. So it goes.

I was pretty dead-set on working for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. For one, it is such a well-regarded publication that it would be a shame not to try it out. For another, it was my goal to be on that masthead the second I walked through the doors at Ryerson. 

But the almighty Plan of Study kinda’ fucked with my head once I submitted it.

I’m currently in TV class, and I’m enjoying the technical side of it a lot more than I anticipated. Choosing the RRJ means closing the door on the tech side of journalism that I’m growing to love. Choosing the RRJ means that those in the broadcast or online courses have the upper hand if I change my mind about my career path. (Of course, I still have the basic skills; I just don’t have the expertise that the others will.)

But not choosing the RRJ means losing out on the magazine expertise that comes with being on a masthead with a team of other feature writers. It means losing out on the opportunities I would love to have if I don’t actually change my mind.

It also means losing out on the real-world internship experience that would come with choosing the “print” stream.

And now, what with all the “what ifs,” I’m finding myself going in crazy circles trying to figure out if I made a mistake or not; and I have a pain in my left arm that may or may not be the start of an angina attack.

What if I’m screwing up my entire future?

There are so many kids dropping out of the program like flies and so many kids who are so sure of their lives and direction (and I thought I was one of them, but I’m not). There is so much going on at once and it’s giving me vertigo.

Yesterday, someone told me I was a genius because I have accomplished so much in so little time and I almost threw up in my mouth. I have no idea how to handle the fact that this isn’t just school anymore; this is a career. I still see myself as an immature little girl who got a haircut last weekend to look like D.W. from Arthur. 

I don’t know if I’m mentally and emotionally capable of freelancing or just the general pressures of the high-paced world of journalism. I don’t know if I can handle angry letters to the editor or the knowledge that I’m only as good as my last article.

I don’t know if I want to be a journalist. If I end up a successful journalist, I might wind up like Campbell Saunders; but if I end up in PR I’ll feel like a failure; and if I end up not writing at all, the $6K in tuition for four years will have been a waste and I have no fucking clue what else I would do because writing has always been the path, the back-up plan, the “go-to-if-you-are-in-trouble” route.

Maybe I’m just experiencing “second-year doubt.” It’s common, right? Right?

I don’t know anything anymore.

Let’s talk | Thoughts by Erica

Today is #BellLetsTalk day. If you don’t live in Canada, this event is hosted by one of the big three telecommunications companies as a means of talking openly about mental illness. For every text, tweet, long distance call or Facebook share, Bell Canada donates five cents to mental health initiatives in the country.

According to the Canadian Medical Association, 2 in every 3 people suffer in silence in fear that their peers will reject or judge them if they do, in fact, have a mental illness. To say there is still stigma regarding the issue is an understatement. 

In my own situation, I think mental illness is especially important to talk about for two reasons:

1. It is a prominent, but often overlooked, issue for teens and young adults (particularly at the college- and university-level);
   
   
2. As journalists, we especially have a responsibility to break the stigma, to talk openly about the things that aren’t easy to discuss. When you break it down, that really is our job.

Yet I still see so many people trying to be all “hush, hush” about the issue. There is still shame in being mentally ill. Much of that stems from the stereotypes that still float around: that if you are “mentally ill” you need to be institutionalized; that it is your own fault; that you are “crazy.” It all comes from a lack of education, and occasionally, compassion. 

The stigma of mental illness played a large role in my life and family alone. I suffered for years because I was afraid to tell anyone how I felt. I figured they would immediately dismiss how I felt as hormonal or a “phase,” and that I would never get the help I needed. Ironically, by not telling them, I still wasn’t getting any help; and I continued to sink lower and lower. Eventually, my self-esteem was non-existant and I often had thoughts of suicide. I never told anyone; and if I did, I undermined my own feelings, brushing them off in fear of being less than perfect — the way I ought to be.

I sought help quietly and alone. I wrote often — a catharsis of sorts. I used every online resource I could find. I read books on anxiety and depression. Eventually, I got well enough to get through the mundane day-to-day routine.

But just last month, all of the hard work of trying to overcome the feelings became to overwhelming; and I crumbled. I was sobbing my eyes out before every class, and some days, I chose not to go at all. I was exhausted no matter how many hours I slept. I didn’t want to leave my bed, let alone go out with friends. And the thought of trying to balance school, assignments, work and relationships made my throat close up and my stomach do backflips. 

I realized I needed real help.

I am not ashamed to say that today I attended my first real counselling appointment; in fact, I’d say the date is quite fitting. I am not ashamed to admit that I’m a frequenter of the Depression Forums or that I have pen pals whom trade stories and coping techniques with me to make the days a little less bumpy. I’m not ashamed of how I feel, of my anxiety, of my depression. 

And I can only be proud of what I did because of the changing ways, the growing knowledge that it’s okay not to be okay.

The fact that a corporation as big as Bell annually promotes a better understanding of mental illness is huge. But, there is still a lot of work to be done. It starts with individual stories, like my own. If we don’t share, we only reinforce the stigma.

Here are some stories you should read:

“Suicide Notes” by Liam Casey
“Searching for solid ground” by Asher Greenberg
“Media and the hard truth about suicide” by Stephen J.A. Ward