I thought awhile about whether or not I should share my experiences of this year. My friends and family probably wouldn’t call me a private person, however, I am much more sensitive than I appear to be, and so putting myself out there to show people exactly what I was going through makes me a little hesitant. I want to share my experiences because as hard as they were for me to get through, I know there was a reason it happened to me and maybe someone reading this is going through something similar. Even though I said I was going to share my experiences of this last school year, I really need to start a little earlier, to give you the proper background. I need to go back to my freshman year of college.

Coming into my freshman year I was nervous, as all college freshmen are. However, I was very nervous about being homesick. I hated sleep-away camps, and I never really loved spending the night at friends’ houses. I was just a homebody -- and still am. I like my own bed in my own room with my dogs. So going away, I was nervous; I was especially nervous because I was going to be in a quad. (For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s one room with four girls in it.) For me, this was kind of a big deal considering I have only ever had my own room, so going from that to living with three strangers was a big deal. Everyone told me to watch out for those first few weeks: “They were the worst few weeks of my life.” However, ironically enough, it was great. I wasn’t homesick at all. In fact I had to be the strong one for my friends who were homesick. It was a great start off to the year.

Spring semester of freshman year, I was taking a few hard classes. In my mind, it was better to get them done and over with all at once, which clearly was mistake. Taking these classes had me stressed out for the majority of the semester. In fact, in the last two or three weeks, I was sick. I felt like I was going to throw up almost every single day. My stomach was upset, I was getting headaches; I was just wanting to be done. I blamed it on the food. Because what else could it be? I even set up a doctor’s appointment back home for a week and a half after classes were done. By the time I got to doctors appointment, I was feeling a lot better, which just verified to me that of course it was the food at school.

I then started up on my first summer class. During this time, I was also working pretty often. I would wake up in the morning, work on my class for a few hours, go to work, come home, work on my class some more, and go to bed. It was the same cycle, over and over. Eventually, my first class ended; then I had a week off before my second class started, and the cycle started again. I finished my summer classes with a week and a half before the fall semester started. So, really, I only had about two and a half weeks of summer that I wasn't in class, but in that time I was still working, so I never really had a full break.

I started at the semester with 18 credits, and in the first week I had what I would soon find out to be my first anxiety attack. After the first day classes, I wanted to get ahead on my homework, so I started working and was in the library for six hours. The thought of this being the rest of my semester started making me more and more anxious, not to mention overwhelming me. And soon the sickness was back. I would wake up in the morning feeling like I had a stomach bug. I wasn't hungry. I had no appetite, and the thought of food made me feel like I would throw up. When I would eat, I could only eat two or three bites before feeling overwhelmingly full almost to the point of sickness. I also would cry at the drop of a hat. And to those of you who know me know that I'm not a big crier. I think I scared my roommate a little bit when I went through an entire box of tissues in one day.

After feeling like this every single day of my first week of classes, I decided I would go to the health center. The nurse there told me she would prescribe me some medicine for nausea. However, she felt like it was just a band-aid over a bigger problem. She told me she felt like it was something bigger than just some bug. She thought I maybe had some anxiety problems, which I just laughed at. She even suggested I go to the counseling center. I just brushed it off.

The next week I woke up in the middle the night, shaking, unable to catch my breath, and scared to death. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I knew something wasn't right. In that moment, I just started praying because that's all I knew I could do. I cried and cried and cried until I eventually cried myself to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I decided I needed to go to the counseling center because nothing else was working.

I got an appointment for later that day, and when I went, I pretty much bawled through the entire appointment, trying to speak to my counselor. She had told me that my symptoms seemed like anxiety. Even though it was the middle of the school week, I ended up going home the next day, and I met with my doctor. She prescribed me an anti-anxiety medicine. I stayed home throughout the weekend and went back to school. I was just starting to feel better at home, and figured that there's no reason why I couldn't go back. But during the ride home, the closer I got to the school, the more anxious I was starting to feel, and by the time I got into my room, I was completely bawling again.

I was at the point where I couldn't sleep, and I would wake up every few hours with either terrible stomach pains, or wake up sobbing but not knowing why. So I started going home. I went home every single weekend, and I even was going home Wednesday nights, spending the night and coming back Thursday because my first class didn't start until the afternoon. This lasted probably a good month and a half before the medicine really started to kick in at all. Right around this time, the dad of one of my best friend’s died, and I took it really hard. I'm sure that my diagnosis made it worse, but I had all these emotions I didn't know how to deal with. I was going to counseling every week, and trying to talk to my friends and family, but I still felt like I was in this rut. Although I felt little bit better, I still knew I wasn't myself.

Being alone was this love-hate relationship. On one hand, I wanted to be by myself because I didn't want to face my friends or family, I didn't want them to know how bad it had gotten. On the other hand, when I was alone I let my mind wander, and that's when I would start getting anxiety and start having panic attacks. When I finally admitted to my counselor that I really felt like I still wasn't myself she brought something up that scared me more than anything else ever had: depression.

Anxiety was easy for me to say to other people. I was able to accept that. But depression seemed like I was a failure. How could I let myself be depressed? How could I have this? I felt like I couldn't tell anybody, and I didn't want to tell anybody. So we switched my medicine to an antidepressant. Some of you may know when you start taking these kinds of medicines, it takes a few weeks for them to really kick in.

So I had pretty much been living with this constant state of panic and anxiety for about three and a half months. This was definitely some of the hardest time in my life. I've never had great self-confidence, but being diagnosed with anxiety and depression took the little that I did have and threw it away. I just didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know who I could turn to because I didn't feel like a lot of other people could understand. However, there was one person that could understand, and that was God.

During this time, I think I prayed more than I ever have in my entire life. The Bible talks about being in a constant state of prayer, and I really felt like that was what I was doing. I also realized who my real friends were during this time. I had people texting me during the day just saying, “Hey, I'm thinking about you and praying for you.” I had people sending me letters. I had professors emailing me saying, “You're in my prayers,” and asking me if they could pray for anything else. Honestly, I think that God allowed this to happen to me because he knew I could get through it. He knew He had put these people in my life that would help me through it, and He knew that I would learn from it and maybe even be able to help someone else from it.

During this time, whenever I'd pray, I constantly felt this overwhelming sensation that God was preparing me to help someone else. I felt him saying to me, “You need to go through this so you can understand when other people go through this,” which is quite a humbling experience if you ask me. I don't want to ask for help ever. But this made me. I realized I couldn't be the strong pillar that I always had been. I definitely needed to lean on people, and learning to be okay with that was one of the hardest things I ever did. But now that I'm on the other side of this, I can honestly say I'm thankful that this happened to me. If you asked me during that time, I would probably have never said that.

I know there's a reason God lets us go through these things. We can take comfort in the fact that He'll never give us more than we can bear. So for those of you who are going through something like this, the first thing I would say to you is pray. Pray because that's honestly the most important thing we can be doing. Secondly, I would say find someone you can talk to, whether that be a counselor or friend or family member. It's so important to have someone that you can talk to about what is going on. I was so lucky to have the family I have and the friends that I have and being at the school that I was. I know not everyone is as lucky as I was, but the one thing that everyone has is God.

If you are in a place where you don’t have people you can rely on, you can always rely on him. Pray that He brings someone into your life that can help you. Pray that He can just be there with you, and through it all, continue to praise him. One of the hardest things we can learn to do is to praise Him through the storms of life. When I look back at those few months, I think those are definitely the hardest months of my life. However in those months I grew more than I ever thought I could. My relationship with God got so much better than it ever has been, and my friendships became so much stronger because I was able to lean on people. I know there was a reason that I went through this. If you're going through this too, I know there's a reason you're going through it as well. Trust in God that He has a plan for you because I know He does just like He did for me.