What It’s Like….I’m not okay
I may be using an MCR to describe how I’m currently feeling, but in all honestly, I truly am, not okay.
Whenever I post this, maybe the same night I’m writing it, or 10 months later, I’ll be back in therapy to continue some of the initial progress I made in understanding and healing myself in the first part of the year. I put therapy on pause, mainly cause my therapist had went on leave, but also because I needed a break from it and wanted to give myself time to process everything we had discussed during it. Therapy has been so great and even while I haven’t been in therapy for the past 3-4 months, I’ve still found myself using many of the techniques my therapist has gone through with me and shifting my mindset and it’s helped a lot. But it’s not perfect, and in fact, I think I’ve been drifting recently. So going back to therapy is a very good thing for me.
But I’m going back to therapy is a different state. A state that frankly I can only describe as “not-naa.”
I haven’t been feeling like myself nor have I been a great person to be around recently. Not to blame everything on MCAT but much of this change started when I began this nearly 8 month study journey. I started studying for the MCAT back in June and now almost 3 months into my study journey, 3 months closer to taking an exam that will have to save my medical applications, 3 months closer to opening the AMCAS app and beginning my MD-PhD app journey, I’ve changed. Drastically. And for the worse.
I feel almost out of my own body. I’m having trouble finding happiness, seeing the good in people, not being so negative, numb or hopeless. I’ve become more skeptical, off-putting and I’m having trouble just with everything to do with the world and the spaces that I occupy.
Spaces.
Spaces.
Spaces that I thought were safe, no longer feel safe to me. But is that because I’m interpreting things in the wrong way because I’m in this more depressive state or because I’m actually seeing people for their true colors and the natural instincts that I have as a Black woman are revealing to me the microaggressions and racism I’ve ignored? And if that latter of this is true, then once again, what safe spaces do I really have because it feels like I just don’t have any.
Studying for MCAT has further instilled the disdain that I have towards the barriers that are in place to exclude low-income students like me from being successful. I stare at my diploma and the memories and experiences that still haunt me from undergrad creeps back up again. My first year, the mistakes I made, the things I couldn’t control; it all comes crawling back.
Everything hurts so much and not at all at the same time.
I’m trying so hard to be strong, to tough it out, to get through this rough period that is supposed to be rough. But it’s so hard.
I’ll do it, I’ll reach a point where these feelings, this mental state, it will pass. But first, I’d really like a shoulder to cry sob endlessly into for maybe three days.
