sorry if this is like. an invasive q but as someone who has been open about mental health issues: did you have any really bad periods overlap with school/uni? and if so do you have any tips because... like. is it worth toughing out a degree, or do you prioritise mental health knowing failing will probably fuck you up worse in the long run, esp for financial reasons?
I definitely did - I am the classic ‘extremely bright kid whose performance gradually slumped and slumped until I scraped a pass on my degree and tried to forget it ever happened.’
Here’s something I will say: academic qualifications are great but they are worth what you get out of them, not the piece of paper at the end. If you’re able to maximise a degree and learn eg: how to get further funding, make connections, gain skills etc then: great! It’s going to help your career prospects. But the bit of paper saying you finished, somehow, doesn’t help your career prospects that much, if you’re unable to do anything with it.
If what you’re doing is stewing in mental hell, then right now is not the moment for this course or maybe for you or for whatever circumstances are going on.
Universities have ways of suspending studies, usually and even with like A-Levels or whatever you can opt to take a year out and come back. Schools and unis would prefer to help you take some time out than to fail a student, so definitely talk to your tutor or head of studies - they’re genuinely there for this, as much as it might feel like you’re bothering them. I wish I had tbh.
What do you actually want to do, right now? There’s nothing shameful in saying just some work that you can competently get done, without it coming home with you, to take off the mental ‘you’re a failure, you’re a failure, you’re a failure’ beating. Retail work made me happier, much more productive and much more able to read and enthuse about things than my degree ever did. I’d come home and write, y’know.
Be kind to yourself; physical/mental health analogies are questionable but if your degree was causing you some severe allergy, where your skin turned red-raw and you struggled to wear clothes, then you wouldn’t think ‘oh I should push through this for the certificate’ you’d think ‘I need to get this sorted, so I can come back and do my degree properly.’
I had to quit a job recently because I realised I had gone, how you say, fucking mental and I couldn’t manage to do it. And screaming at myself that I should be able to do it because on a good day, in the right circumstances I absolutely could have done it in my sleep, was just stupid.
It was making me low-level suicidal all the time and combined with, y’know, Everything™️ I just needed to get the fuck away from the mental torture chamber about it. You can’t just keep giving yourself another 400V of pure self-hatred and, when your quivering brain stops crying enough to even try and do the thing, effectively laugh at all of its distress signals that it can’t right now and hook it back up.
It’s really hard to be kind to yourself over the markers that we’re driven towards by society but an uncomfortable truth is also that: the world is changing so rapidly we don’t honestly know what the hell anyone will need in 10 years so if what you need right now is a break in beating yourself up and getting more miserable, take that out. Work out what you really want before you keep forcing yourself down this line for what could be the rest of your life; if you’re finding your degree distressing now, that piece of paper telling you you need to make something of it will rule your life. It’s ok to have to rethink, it’s really very dumb we make choices like this so young.
(I did international relations, seemed very pressing at the time; absolute garbage, wish I’d done media studies and video editing)
