Brain was bad enough today that I actually made myself go to a drop-in crisis counseling appointment at our student health center (with the kind of trauma I have with school mental health services, this is almost unfathomable, and indicative of just how dire things have gotten) and it..... actually turned out to be genuinely helpful. Which is obviously a good thing, but also has me a little incandescently angry on behalf of my 19 year-old self, who got totally thrown to the wolves by my first university.
I went in today expecting either a patronizing, useless conversation that made me feel ultimately worse or for someone to strong-arm me into making decisions I wasn't comfortable with because of me so clearly being in crisis, and instead got a quick, "triage" evaluation from one provider, sent off to a second one for an actual therapy appointment where I got some genuinely good advice from someone who felt like she genuinely wanted to help me, and scheduled for a second follow-up with her next week.
I'm still feeling pretty mentally wobbly, but managed to at least send off several emails I'd been putting off and feel like even though I missed most of my classes today, I might at least get something turned in. Which is very much not how I ever felt when I left similar urgent mental health drop-ins at the terrible expensive "elite" private school I went to as a freshman (I'll actually expose myself a tad and point fingers here, it was NYU; don't make my mistakes). I'm glad I got something that felt like real help today, but god... it does make me realize just how unfair my experiences were my first year of college.