Please forgive me for saying this, but I don't love Kelly Clarkson.
Her music, that is. I'm sure she's a gal of great character. I do apologize if that contradicts the implications of the article's headline. Of course, I'm not going to pretend like I don't know all the words to "Since U Been Gone" and "Because of You"...and, yeah, okay...I do know approximately ninety percent of the lyrics to the 2011 hit "Stronger."
But I digress. While I am not an avid follower of Mrs. Clarkson's music, the aforementioned single's premise has profound relevance to my own life.I am not blind to the fact that it's a little strange to relate my battle with anxiety and depression to a song that was popular when I was 12, but I was hoping it would lighten the mood.
I've probably cried more in the last year than in all the preceding years of my life combined. I'll spare you from some of the deeply personal details for now, but objectively speaking, life has the capacity to be really difficult. Subjectively speaking, life sucks.
Allow me to briefly illustrate.
It was 4:15 on Valentine's Day, and I was in the Trader Joe's parking lot. Raindrops pelted the windshield of my car and almost drowned out the sound of my mother's voice telling me that the company she was working for would be going out of business in April- a month before I was due to graduate.This news came only days after being accepted into the Honors College at the College of Charleston.
The feeling that consumed me can only be likened to the having a premonition of being the passenger in a car crash; this feeling that everything was bound to implode at any moment, but having no means to prevent the inevitable outcome.
While I dealt with moving forward and revising my plan for the future, my social life was incomparable shambles. My senior year of high school was a breeding ground for sadness, and every day seemed to give way to new heights of misery.
Of course, people endure struggles much worse than mine, but at the time, I felt like my world was crumbling. I lost a lot of my friends and spent most of my weekends alternating between crying and watching Bojack Horseman.
During high school, my friends and I were the executive board for the student body, the leaders of the Student Government Association, and for some unknown reason, the target of some very harsh scrutiny from the student body.
Perhaps the other situations in my life only stood to amplify what was going on at school, but people always had something rude to say about the organization I had literally dedicated hundreds of hours of my life to, including the people that were in it. I was also the editor of the school paper.
I was the only senior girl, so you can probably imagine how that panned out. Even the guys on the staff that I assumed to be my friends blatantly disrespected me, and I ended up assuming much more responsibility in an effort to win their favor.
As is typical when one assumes too much responsibility, the stress in my life seemed insurmountable, and I had serious thoughts about ending it all. My anxiety was the worst it had ever been. I missed several days of school. I felt nervous at all times, and suffered from stomach aches nearly every day from all the incessant worrying. Ultimately, I felt like a failure, but I was too afraid to talk to anyone about my feelings in order to avoid being burdensome.
In hindsight, I should have done the exact opposite. I regret not being more assertive. I regret not telling my friends how I felt. I regret letting the actions of others be so detrimental to my mental health. I regret allowing myself to succumb to weakness, but I’ve taken a vow to be stronger. Confronting the things that I could control truly changed my life.
In the past three months, I reached out to my dad, with whom I hadn’t spoken to in 12 years; I moved to Charleston; I’m writing for Odyssey, and I am working towards building a new life here, with my past traumas as a guide for moving forward.
So, yes, like I said, life sucks, but it’s also beautifully messy, and the times when it’s easiest to see this simple truth is when you press on to the next day.
Kelly Clarkson says (or sings, rather) it best- what doesn’t kill you does, in fact, make you stronger.
