It's 5 AM on a Wednesday morning. You're getting ready to go to work, then go to the 8 a.m. class you begrudgingly took because there were no other options. The night before, you were awake until the wee hours of the morning with a cup of cold coffee to your right, countless scattered papers to your left. In between laid your laptop, which was so unbelievably hot you could feel the heat radiating off of it and thought that it would surely combust into flames at any moment. To top it off, the only words you have on your document is:
"I have no idea what I'm doing."
It happens to the best of us. Life gets so overwhelmingly stressful that you can't focus on any specific thing, which causes you to have trouble completing classwork, socialize with friends, or even be a functioning human being.
Instead, you just curl into bed and skip everything you have to do that day because sometimes it's better to ignore things momentarily than stress out over them. Unfortunately, an endless guilt follows—you missed work, you missed your involvements, but most importantly, you missed class. Now you're even more stressed out that you're falling behind, all because of the pressure that was put on by your professors' syllabus that says, verbatim, "ABSOLUTELY NO ABSENCES, EVER. I DON'T CARE IF YOUR RELATIVE PASSES AWAY, YOU WILL BE IN MY CLASS."
No one should ever make you feel guilty because you were so stressed out, drowning under all of the countless expectations thrust onto a college student, that you took a mental health day to yourself. Sometimes attendance and participation grades just don't matter in comparison to your own well-being.
Even if other people don't understand, even if you miss an assignment, the world will go on. Your professor will forget you missed a class that one time. Giving yourself a day in which you ensure that you're happy and healthy is never something you should be ashamed of.
This doesn't mean you should skip class every time you feel stressed. It means that there will be days when you just can't take it all and like you're going to break out in tears at any moment—that can be the day where you skip class. Finish that essay. E-mail it in. Crawl into your bed wearing your favorite pair of pajamas, queue up some Netflix, relax and eat junk food.
Everything will be okay. When you graduate, you won't look back and be happy you went to every single class while on the brink of a mental breakdown. You'll look back and be glad you took one day to spend time by yourself.
And trust me, you deserve that much.
