Mental Health Awareness – please speak to a mate

I want to start this blog by saying how I arrived at uni with a lot of positivity. I am an outgoing person and have always had a solid social network around me. I loved the first few months at university and I met a lot of great people.

Something changed

But something changed. I started feeling a bit low and for no particular reason, I just didn’t feel myself. I brushed this off as just one of those days at the start but then it became more regular, I struggled to snap out of it, didn’t enjoy going out and became quite irritable.

I can’t quite explain how I was feeling, I just couldn’t be happy and this started to take over. I’d be sitting in lectures just staring at the lecturer but not actually taking anything in, my mind was elsewhere. This also became the case when just watching tv or out with mates, I was just staring and not really listening. It then became quite an effort to talk to people and it was exhausting to try and pretend to be myself.

I reached boiling point

I finally reached boiling point on a night out and after drinking a bit too much alcohol which was starting to be my escape. I reacted quite angrily over something small. I said things to my mates that were completely out of order and went home that night and cried myself to sleep.

I woke up the next day feeling absolutely horrendous and my anxiety was just awful, I couldn’t move my legs, it was that bad. I made a promise to myself to try and sort this out because I was getting worse and worse. I apologised to my mates and then it all just came out, I just opened up to them, cried a bit, cried a bit more and then had a lot of hugs. I can’t stress enough about how this changed everything. My mates were fully behind me and encouraged me to get help and talk to someone. I struggled at first because the bad days were still there but I did it. I spoke to various support services such as the wellbeing team and my GP and there was a plan in place to get me feeling better and it has worked. It wasn’t instant but over time, I felt back to myself.

I look back on that period and it scares the hell out of me. What would have happened if I didn’t speak to someone? If you take anything from this blog…….please speak to a mate, a family member or even your tutor if you are feeling low. You don’t have to have a diagnosed mental illness to talk to someone. If you start to not feel like yourself, like I did, make that first step and speak to someone.