In our youth we truly think we are invincible. We never ask for help. Saying yes to things comes quicker than a tentative "no", which shifts the delicate balance of our sanity. The beauty of idyllic adolescence is that we truly believe that we have these superpowers that allow for us to work tirelessly into the night, and remain alert and stable during the day. We list off our accomplishments and responsibilities like they are the rites that we worship each day, and in a way we do. The constant movement and demand of our collegiate lives lead us to believe that we can do it all because that is the facade that we present to the public. When in reality, we are not super people, we are simply human.

I kept myself moving throughout college, from the moment I stepped on to campus. The belief that if I did not stop to think, or feel, I wouldn't. It worked for a while, running to and from practice, Greeter meetings, library, but it all caught up with me too soon. I started having panic attacks the second semester of my Freshman year, out of nowhere. I brushed it off as stress and kept moving. Summer allowed me to keep moving in my internship in Washington, DC, and the quick week before I had to be back for Greeters kept me focused on further goals. Everything came back with a vengeance. My panic attacks had become debilitating and kept me from class, my friends, everything I enjoyed. Rather than identifying this as a problem I continued to immerse myself further into the chaos that was my schedule. Piling on activity after activity, keeping myself too busy to think, neglecting my physical and mental health. At the end of my sophomore year, I remember looking in the mirror while I waited for my computer to reload, and I had no idea who was staring back at me. It looked like a swamp person version of a character from the movie, Wall-e. This is absolutely not a hyperbole, I had never seen the person who was the reflection of who I was at the moment. Rather than identifying the issues that created my new body, I added more to time in Lund and a few more extracurriculars.

The tactics of a "too busy to think" lifestyle allowed for my heart rate to barely hover above normal constantly, rather than way too high, very often. Going into Senior year, I picked it up even further, assuring myself that the increase in my activity was to make sure my time at Gustavus was not wasted. Starting in September, I stopped sleeping. I chalked it up to too much caffeine or time on my computer, but when I went a week with ten hours of total sleep, I knew something was really wrong. I developed sleep anxiety, which sounds totally fake, but is absolutely real. My body was so scared of shutting down, that it wouldn't allow itself too. I had pent up so much anxiety during the day that my body released it all at night. I had to go back on anti-anxiety medicine (which I hate), in order for my body to function normally. The doctor told me I need to get ahold of my exponentially expanding anxiety, otherwise, the remainder of my Senior year will be significantly less productive.

It took me until March to ask for help, after almost a year of making excuses for myself. At Gustavus, it is often a competition to see who is the busiest, or most tired, and I hate to break it to you all, but that is not healthy. We stay busy either for ourselves or others, and that's not a bad thing. Give back to the community while you are there. When your involvements begin to deter from your mental and physical health, that is where the problem lies. I had to realize that I am not superwoman, I am just a girl who is very tired, very poor, and very stressed out. Being vulnerable is not a bad thing, and asking for help is often the right thing to do. The conversation about mental health is still so stigmatized, that people who have high functioning mental conditions are often overlooked, but that is when it becomes the most dangerous. When we are made to feel like our stress, our anxiety/depression/whatever, is insignificant to our peers through competitions of involvement. That is when help is most often not sought out. Do not wait until it is four in the morning, and you're crying because you've convinced yourself that your house ghost is going to take you in the night because you're the only one awake to ask for help.