Mental Health

My mental health is getting really bad right now. I have heart palpitations all the time. I had 3 big anxiety attacks today. I feel like people around me expect my problems to have just gone away because I'm in California and I get to hike everyday. My problems feel many times worse here than they did in Illinois.

On a separate but related note, I've wanted to write about an old teacher of mine for some time now and I think I'm just going to start now. I am realizing now that a lot of my mental health struggles aren't new things. I've had these issues my whole life, but they only really started to get significant in my elementary years. I have fond memories of all of my elementary teachers, except for one. Mr. C was an upper el teacher for most of the time that I was in elementary, and was present in my schooling from 1st through 7th grade. For that whole time he would treat me differently than he would treat other kids. I know I had very little respect for him and perhaps that was part of the difference in treatment that I perceived receiving. That doesn't make it okay. By the time I was in 7th grade, half my life I had been dealing with Mr. C's poor treatment of me on a daily basis. 

On the first day of school in first grade I remember being unable to enter the classroom out of crippling fear. I remember Mr. C coming out into the hallway and telling me to man up and stop crying. At the time I think I thought I was just shy, but now I recognize that was my anxiety taking control. In that moment, I would have rather gone back to my primary class than have entered the elementary classroom. Most of all I remember just wanting to curl up in a ball and hide from the world. I didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone I just wanted to be alone. I think my relationship with Mr. C could have been very different had he treated me with compassion, or had he tried to talk to me in that first interaction where I was one of his students. Instead, by being abrasive he set the tone for what would be the very emotionally traumatic 6 years that would follow.

A few months ago a friend from my grade mentioned how he remembered me not really doing anything that everyone else wasn't doing, but me getting in trouble way more than everyone else. This is what triggered my realization that hey, maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe there was actually something wrong there.

Another major issue was with Mr. C's handling of my elevator phobia. For a long time I had a huge irrational fear of elevators. I would kick, and fight, and scream, and do anything in my power to not take an elevator anywhere. I used to skip trips to my dad's office to play pingpong because I didn't want to ride in an elevator to go up a floor. I didn't want to take the risk that there might be an elevator ride that I had to take. Anyways, Mr. C's way of handling this was to force me to ride up and down in an elevator, every day at school, for 4 months straight. I remember trying to get out of going to school everyday for those months. I remember pretending like I forgot that I was supposed to ride the elevator. I remember going downstairs before I was allowed to and hiding so that I didn't have to ride the elevator. And through all of it, I remember Mr. C making sure that I got on the elevator every day. I didn't begin to deal with my elevator phobia until a few year later, and I still am not great with it. I still struggle inside with telling myself that everything will be okay. The second part of how this story was harmful to me was the beginning of it. This all started because a younger student broke his leg and had to take the elevator up and down everyday rather than taking the stairs. I remember a bunch of students volunteering to ride with him up and down, to and from lunch each day. But Mr. C singling me out as the person who was going to do it. I remember saying that I didn't want to do it, and him responding that he knows that I don't want to and that's why I had to. I'm getting anxious just writing about this. 

More will follow

-Drew