Being Okay With Uncertainty: Life Update of a Twenty-Something

Being twenty has got to be one of the weirdest things.

No longer able to pull the teenager card, but without the stability I was told came with adulthood. I know I'm still a young adult technically, but this is way more chaotic than I expected. My life at twenty is extraordinarily stressful. In fact, to illustrate, up until roughly forty-eight hours ago, I wasn't even sure I would be a student at Western Carolina this semester.

Mostly this chaos stems from money, or the constantly changing state of having or not having it. Money's play in everyday life has been made more aware to me than it ever has. And a thought struck me yesterday at three am: Money will never go away. Not in my lifetime. Money, and the constant budgeting and math and squeezing from here and there to "make ends meet," is fully exhausting. Is this what adulthood is? Forever?

Up until forty-eight hours ago, I still owed WCU over a thousand dollars because my privately serviced loan was accidentally disbursed in only half, the other being designated from next semester. I didn't have a thousand dollars. I didn't even have thirty at that point. Up until last Wednesday, I wasn't sure of the entire next three months of my life. That is a very not fun place to be dangling at.

Somehow though, I found myself panicking not nearly enough as I had expected from myself, a person extremely not okay with not knowing. Uncertainty fuels many of my nightmares, and also my lingering, but still very real, uneasiness toward the dark. Literally, I'm twenty and need a light to walk to my front door because it's in a corner and the streetlight doesn't reach it. But being uncertain about my status as a student should've been shaking me to my core.

Instead, I had stumbled upon a very odd peace. My future was not up to ME at that moment. It was out of my hands. And my hands weren't fidgeting. I understood my powerlessness. I couldn't change it this time.

So I let myself contemplate life as, not a student, but an employee, a full-time working adult. Starbucks full-time didn't sound so bad. The pay is adequate, and the people pretty great. It could be much worse. I still had my fiancé, our apartment, our cats, my friends. Money would flow in and then out just the same. One less loan for now would be nice. We could save more for our trip out West later this year. We could sell one of our cars, buy a minivan maybe. We could do anything really. Possibilities suddenly opened up that had seemed so unreasonable before. And I was okay with this more flexible scenario. I was comfortable even.

It wasn't apathy, it was acceptance. I was accepting a possible future(s) which should've made me feel like a failure in relation to any goal I had ever been taught to hold myself to. Education was always supposed to come first. Dropping out, even for just a semester, and because of sucky financial communication that was not 100% my fault, was supposed to be rock bottom. Working without the school part was supposed to mean I had given up, that I had failed at what was expected of me as a twenty-something, a college age person of my particular background. I was supposed to bettering myself, making some progress toward a degree that would one day get me a "real job," a nine to five, catapulting me to true adulthood. But Starbucks and saving up for a semester didn't sound so bad. This comfort felt wrong, but I still felt it. So I waited.

Eventually my loan was amended and my school balance zeroed out. I was relieved to be done waiting. But a part of me was almost disappointed. I had embraced uncertainty and open-ended possibility for the first time in my adult life, and it had slipped away.

I'm happy to be a student, don't get me wrong. I love my classes this semester, they all feel more relevant than ever, but nearly tasting a weird sort of freedom that would have accompanied non-student-ness has left a bit of want in its wake. I want to live more open-endedly. I want to be more comfortable with uncertainty. I want to be unbothered by even my near future not being set in stone. Things will settle as they settle, and life will go on.

This doesn't mean I want to be passive in my life, it means I want to live more aggressively aware of how little control I have in the grand scheme of things, of how much it just doesn't matter sometimes, of how much easier it is to just live and not care about tradition or conventionality or past values that have expired.

It means life happens, shit happens, and happiness happens. Everything ebbs and flows, and I am now certifiably hippie dippie, apparently. I know, big surprise.

Why People With a Mental Illness Can't Just "Be Positive"

I have never been paralyzed like this before. I have never been unable to control my body like this before. I know depression and anxiety often accompany each other, but I have never experienced this mixture. I assumed I was immune to anxiety. I know what I feel is not even half as powerful as what others may suffer from, so I know there is always someone who has it worse. I am not claiming to be unique in my experience, or to be having the most extreme case.

Today I was hit by a wall. Or rather, I hit a wall. How impact occurred isn't important. The fact is that the wall and I met in my head. My head told my body there was a wall and I could go no further. My mental state had rendered my physical body paralyzed. To be so helpless, if even only for a few moments, a minute or so at most, was terrifying, almost more so than what I had originally felt in the overarching situation. I was overcome by tears and caught in a trap so tight my feet would not move. I could only stand there in tears. I could barely look at my boyfriend out of shame, or embarrassment, I don't know which. Maybe both. Either way, this person I loved was clearly in pain at the sight of my pain, but nothing could be done to remedy it. I simply gave up on the situation and retreated. My mental condition had told me no and I was powerless. I was in shock at the force with which I had been stopped.

I don't know how to feel. If I say I just didn't try hard enough to fight it, I'm claiming everyone suffering from mental illness isn't trying hard enough, or that mental illness is entirely conquerable through brute mental force or a strong will, which isn't fair to anyone. But when I say that I am powerless, I feel ashamed. I feel that people will read this and think I am making excuses for myself, or think I am willingly surrendering my control to it, as if I don't want to fight back. I am at a place I don't know how to explain, or how to understand myself. I want to say I am strong and can fight it, but I think these things already and I was still paralyzed. I have a will, you could say I am a willful person, but having depressive thoughts while also scaring yourself into a statue are the worst conditions to prove it.

Will is erased in a way that has nothing to do with your own want. Your want is to get better, to function again on the level everyone else seems to be. But another want exists, and it is ugly. It is the want to stay the same. Change is scary in itself and even change from being scared to being less scared is change. This want is not something we readily admit to ourselves and it may not even really make us act any different. But the fact is that a part of us is too afraid to want to change. It keeps me blaming myself, it keeps me telling myself that this is stupid, that I'm stupid, that it's ridiculous to not be able to face a professor whose class you've missed, who you desperately want to explain yourself to.

One's own thoughts are often said to be one's own worst enemy and I don't think that saying is far off for those facing mental illness, even if they are not in the same context as those without. My thoughts become a spiral into I can't and I never and stupid useless hopeless worthless. And even when I actively try to "be better," even if it's just I got out of bed today, I never allow myself a victory. The victory would be too small, I tell myself. How much is a small victory even worth compared to all the things you failed to do today? Or yesterday? Or this week? What about how you failed here or here or there? Quickly the victory is lost in the sea of failures my thoughts remind me of. I allow myself no good moments longer than their arrival. They appear and I swiftly dismiss them. Even having friends doesn't allow me any lingering healing. Maybe when I'm with them, I look okay, I act okay, I tell myself I am okay. But I know as soon as I am alone again, or in company that knows and understands, I am battered with inaudible words, worries of not being worthy of friends, of being silly for thinking they could fix me. It's a hole I tumble into even when I'm with those I love. My face may change, but my heart is still trapped; my body eventually is a slave to my head.

Like today when I was frozen on the steps out of my building, when I was frozen by a fear that did not even seem rational, that I tell myself could easily overcome if I was just "better," if I was just "stronger." Even though I have people who care about me, even though I have a boyfriend willing to walk with me to see my professor, to be there when I was clearly terrified, to be a guide to my slow, unruly feet, I was trapped, I was locked in my fear. I felt I had let him down. I feel that I am letting everyone down. I feel like my professor must think I don't respect him, that I don't value my education, that I am just a lazy, uncaring young person.

I know you will tell me these are invalid, silly thoughts, I tell myself the same thing, but I still have them. I feel both sides of every thought, and it's exhausting and confusing and makes for some very, very bad days when all you can do is cry and sit in a chair and eat when your boyfriend reminds you and take a deep breath when your boyfriend suggests it. Some days were like today. And sometimes that's all you can do.