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tzenus
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PathStep 13 Compassion hearts49 Forum posts1 Forum upvotes0 Current upvotes0 Age GroupAdult Last activeJanuary, 2024 Member sinceDecember 3, 2021
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School and family stress
Anxiety Support / by tzenus
Last post
 December 4th, 2021
...See more My anxiety recently got worse and I’m not sure how to handle it or some of the circumstances around it. I’ve always been an anxious kind of person - there would be these random moments when I get irrational thoughts of something bad happening or that so-and-so secretly hated me regardless of the evidence. I told myself I was being stupid, and I internalized everything, hoping it’d go away and forcing myself to keep going. In October, my brother made me aware of a family issue going on. It was apparently a serious fight between my parents and also one of their workers, serious enough that my aunt was worried someone might be killed or arrested. My parents didn’t even contact me about it. I spent about a week worrying about what happened and the state of everyone, just for it to be brushed off in a 15 second phone call and “It’s OK now”. It’s great that no one got hurt, but this made me feel unwelcome and forgotten in my own family. Because of how much this plagued me, I couldn’t put in the time and effort into a hard class I’m taking and I failed an exam that was a week or two afterwards. I know that grades aren’t everything, but I’ve always done well in school and my family places very high emphasis on grtting good grades with most of those expectations on me. This just made everything feel even worse. Suddenly, I had trouble sleeping because I kept worrying over my grades. It became harder for me to even get up out of bed because of this overwhelming sense of dread. Even when I left my room to attend my other classes or to be with friends, it always stayed in the back of my mind. All schoolwork suddenly seemed so intimidating, everytime I had to do anything, I felt weighed down and overwhelmed again. It felt like my normal anxiety but worse. A few weeks after, I had to drive home for Thanksgiving. Driving on the highway for over an hour is always stressful for me ever since one of my tires blew out about two years ago. This time, I was also anxious over what I might come home to as well as school. I’ve gotten very few updates on what happened since that phonecall in October, so I wasn’t sure if there was still tension or if one of my parents left or if everything went back to normal like nothing ever happened. About halfway through my trip, a weird feeling came over me. It suddenly felt like I was looking at the world around me through a something like a VR headset in first person, like the hands on the wheel weren’t my actual hands and I couldn’t control them. This feeling lasted for roughly an hour and didn’t go away until I was 15-20 minutes from my exit. The entire time, I was terrified that I would crash since it felt like I couldn’t control the hands so I couldn’t control the car. I’ve tried looking it up and I think I disscociated, but it’s not confirmed. The good news is that everyone in my family seems to just be past the fight. No one mentioned it and when my brother asked, my dad just said that children should stay out of adults’ business. I spent Thanksgiving break nervous that whatever happened on the drive home would happen again on my drive back to campus and about my next exam. I managed to get back safely, which I’m very happy for. Right after break ended, I had another exam for that hard class again, which I failed again. This felt even worse than the first one because I spent so much time studying and going over the materials and practice problems and I genuinely thought I understood most of what’s happening. I feel awful and ashamed. Now, the only way I can even pass this class is if I do perfectly on the final exam, which I know I can’t do so I’d fail and affect my transcript for med school. I want to withdraw from the class, but then I’d lose my main scholarship and my parents would get mad at me and I’m scared that they’ll start arguing again. A few days ago I started worrying about the drive home that I’ll have to do in a few weeks. Everything combined is making me feel so stressed out and I can feel it affecting other aspects of my life too. I’m scared and not really sure what to do. I’m sorry for this long message, but I just need to get this out. It’s hard to talk about this with my friends and family and I’ved heard the on-campus counseling is always busy.
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