Karla, 25, is a Junior Consultant for an online marketing company, from the Philippines. Here she shares why she has studied many different topics, how her experience with depression affected her education, how FutureLearn supported her and opened new doorways and why she supports the LGTBQ+ community.
Reader note: This story contains the discussion of mental health issues, self-harm and personal experience of sexuality.
“I’ve always been very perennially curious about an extensive array of topics; from literature to philosophy, to religion, music, and history. Entering college in 2008 definitely opened the floodgates to more knowledge and to people who hold diverse paradigms and viewpoints. Entering college, likewise, changed my life in a way I could never have imagined.
In 2011, I began experiencing symptoms of severe clinical depression. I began sobbing while writing my course essays and papers. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I had been experiencing the most extreme mood changes which I couldn’t fathom and understand. Being constantly guilty didn’t help either. I was feeling this pervading, consistent self-condemnation because I had been sexually confused. Depression and being bisexual weren’t a healthy mix.
As the years went on, I found myself unable to process anything I’d read. It didn’t matter if the text was challenging or surprisingly easy. I began losing chunks of my memory. I started self-harming again, had episodes of psychosis and anxiety attacks, and had multiple suicide attempts dispersed over five to six years. I found out that I was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, borderline personality disorder, and OCD. I also felt alienated because I felt that identifying as queer was totally unacceptable.
I had to take a two-year leave of absence, a mental health sabbatical to rest and recuperate. There, I began taking MOOCs on other platforms. Out of thirty to forty online courses, I had only been able to complete a single course. In a stroke of luck, I found FutureLearn.
Being an introvert, I found interacting with new people quite the challenge (which threatened to heighten my anxiety attacks). It was a massive help to find that FutureLearn had a warm, welcoming, and respectful community of learners. I learned to be more open and receptive to new ideas, and I have been able to adjust to social interaction.
More importantly, it helped me cope, not only with mental illness but with sexuality and accepting myself as a queer female. Additionally, FutureLearn has given me opportunities to learn beyond what I have learned at university. I just found out that I got accepted into my university’s MA English Studies (Anglo-American Literature) program after nine years as an undergrad. FutureLearn has spurred my desire to be in academe and serve my country through being aware of innovations in learning and research with courses such as Shakespeare: Print and Performance and Literature and Mental Health. (I even have certain research topics in mind as I enter the postgraduate program!)
I’m really thankful and blessed to have discovered FutureLearn. It helped me deal with and process my illness and sexuality by re-focusing my attention towards learning. The courses which I’ve mentioned have been helping me maintain more than a year of stability from bouts of clinical depression, anxiety attacks, and hypomania. One course on the site which tackled university research has even helped me start (and finish) my undergraduate thesis on families with members who have a mental illness. I would never have imagined that learning, and gaining knowledge, would help me cope with being bipolar and queer so thank God for FutureLearn!
With my incredible experience with FutureLearn, I hope to be able to help Filipinos in the LGBTQ+ community find representation, as well as those struggling with mental illness to find acceptance and understanding. I’ll definitely take this to heart as a future academic and researcher. We need to break the stigma when it comes to these two groups. FutureLearn has taught me that democratised learning that is full, in-depth, rich, and available should also be an option to underrepresented Filipinos in the Philippines”