Why I Write
I should have known that I would end up being a writer. I had decided it on my first birthday.
As you know, I am half-Korean so for my first birthday, my 돌, I did the ceremonial 돌잡이. In Korean, this is viewed as a fortune-telling custom that allows the child to “pick” their future. In front of me were items like money, food, string, perhaps a ball. I picked none of those. Instead, I picked the pencil.
In Korean culture, this is viewed as a foretelling of someone who will be smart. Today, I’ll take it even more literally. It meant that I would become a writer. So here today, as I type another story on my computer, I am just fulfilling baby Michael’s wishes for his future. I’m using that pencil to tell a story.
Today’s story is about why I write and how specifically it relates to today. Today is Mental Health Awareness Day and I feel like it is time for me to share my story of my own struggles with mental health.
It actually began a long, long time ago. I am 28 now, but I have been dealing with anxiety since I was in middle school. One of the first times I can remember the anxiety getting the best of me was when I was in 6th or 7th grade and social anxieties were causing me to be so anxious that I developed insomnia. I would be unable to stop thinking about the problems at school and I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to go to school so my mom let me stop. I can’t remember how many days I missed but eventually I did go back.
When I first battled anxiety as a teenager, I would get insomnia. I would be so anxious about something that I would stiffen up and be awake for hours. In junior year of high school, I walked out of AP tests that I wasn’t ready for. I hadn’t been able to focus on studying and cello at the same time.
In my junior year of high school, I had chosen to take 5 AP courses (that sounds stupid now) and also attend Saturday music school at Julliard Pre-College (classic overachiever). At the end of the school year around May, the stress became far too great. I had to take the AP exams for all five courses and prepare for my end of the year “jury.” In music, this is about as scary a thing that you can ask a student to do.
A jury is when all the teachers of your instrument listen to you play and judge how much progress you have made that year. If that sounds scary, it is. To make matters worse, I got totally in my head for a reason that I didn’t need to. My cello teacher had said that in that year Julliard was trying a new thing where students that didn’t do well on their jury would be asked not to continue at the Pre-College Program. This was probably never going to happen to me. However, I believed her.
I freaked out. I worked so hard practicing my pieces for that jury that I neglected to study for AP US History. I went to that exam and couldn’t do the essay portion. I just walked out. I had no idea what to write about in response to the prompts. Again, I had let the anxiety rule me. I was thinking too much, not sleeping enough, and letting the anxiety paralyze me from doing the things that I needed to do.
The anxiety didn’t come back again in a real way until I was in college. I was a senior and I hadn’t finished my core writing requirement. This was a course that they wouldn’t confer a bachelor’s degree to any student who hadn’t gotten a satisfactory grade in a core writing class. Many of my friends had finished it sophomore year, but I hadn’t taken one until the first semester of my senior year. I took a psychology research course that doubled as a core writing requirement class. It was a mistake. I was never meant to be a psychologist who writes for academic journals. I failed miserably.
For my final semester, I tried again. However, there were no options for the core writing requirement that I could get into other than an African-American Studies course. It was not anything I had ever studied during my time in college and the professor was well, serious. I was scared. I didn’t believe I had anything to say. I didn’t believe I could write the assignments. I didn’t believe in myself at all. I stopped going to class.
The crazy thing? I lived right across the street from the classroom building. I could literally walk into the building, get to my classroom, look in at my classmates and professor, and walk home unable to open the door. It was that bad. I told no one. I didn’t graduate on time like expected. My family didn’t travel to Ann Arbor to celebrate my graduation in the Big House (yes, I went to University of Michigan-Ann Arbor).
Instead, my parents flew out to talk to me about what had happened. The deans at UMich were very supportive and insisted I visit a therapist to gain an understanding of what had happened. It was something I had to do in order for the deans to be sure I was ready to resume classes that fall.
I had been to see therapists in the past, but never for an extended period of time. I had never been diagnosed with any mental health disorders. I just thought that I got anxious from time to time and would get insomnia if it got bad. I didn’t know myself well enough to realize that this wasn’t healthy.
Mental health is hard work. Your mind is constantly working, sometimes for your own good and sometimes to your own detriment. What I learned that summer is that my mind operates at a baseline of anxiety that is higher than normal. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. My anxiety levels are higher than average and can get heightened easily. In my case, if I get too stressed, I can shut down completely and retreat into a shell where I do nothing to lessen the stress. I just let it take over.
What do I do now to lessen the stress? Lots of things. The first and most important thing I do is visit a therapist every few weeks to continue to work on the different stressors in my life that continue to cause me anxiety. I try to learn skills and coping mechanisms so that I can manage stress outside of therapy. I take an SSRI, Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitor, to make sure that my energy levels are normal so that I don’t also become depressed.
However, one thing that I am doing right now that helps me is writing. I’ll tell you why.
When I was a teenager, my older brother gave me a journal. He told me to write down all my anxieties and thoughts in there. He said it would help me. More than the words I wrote in that journal, I remember his message in the beginning. Because he was right, it does help me to write.
Whether I am thinking about sports, faith, politics, love, relationships, work, etc., there are a million thoughts swimming around in my mind. These thoughts can team up together to become stressful and paralyzing. They can make me feel worthless and incompetent. They can defeat me. They can tell me that the grandest of my dreams, the ones I want so badly, will never happen. They can do whatever they want with me. That’s what anxiety can do to you. It can turn your mind into a negative spiral.
However, I choose to write so that I can see those thoughts on a screen or a page. So that they lose their power. So that someone else can read them and tell me if they are true or false. So that someone can learn from what I am trying to say. So that someone can hear me.
So that someone struggling with these same issues can find a little comfort. So that they may know they are not alone. No matter the struggle, no matter the pain, you are never alone.
