What To Do When The Plan Doesn’t Work Out
Life didn’t look how I thought it would when I was a kid. I was a relatively high achieving student from a middle-class family and naively assumed that I would sail into adulthood, find my one true love, and live happily ever after. It seemed like a given that I would get a “good” job and live comfortably. I didn’t yet understand the concepts of adversity or class struggle because I lived an incredibly sheltered life. The closest I’d come to hardship was developing severe OCD in the summer before junior high, and although I didn’t sleep much in the next few years that followed, I did have a safe home where everything was provided for me.
High school is a defining part of life for most people. You either hated it or you loved it, the latter type sometimes refusing to move on and mature into full-grown adults. My high school experience was not particularly memorable, but it was at the end of that period that I became clinically depressed. I lost all but one friend (I love you, Jane!) and slowly became obsessed with ideas of suicide. It’s not that I wanted to die per se, it was just that I couldn’t imagine continuing to live my life the way it was.
I immediately went into university after high school because, like most of the kids my age, I’d been told that this was the way to secure a good job. However, my mental state was getting worse. I managed…
