Echo: Managing GAD as a Returning Student

Oxford isn’t always a city in my mind; more often an echo. Its sound goes through me when I least expect it and the ringing turns my body cold. The panic is loud and tearful and largely unaccounted for; it surfaces as sweat in mid-November. Five minutes from home and I hold on to deep breaths and what is left of my soft-focus vision, one minute from home and I am close to breaking. It takes a frustration of trembling fingers to unlock the door and finally see myself safe in the hallway mirror: some human shell dimly lit beside the shoe stand– 

an echo. 

It has been two years since I was formally diagnosed with GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder), almost two years since I suspended my studies at Oxford, and just over half a year since I returned to them. This Michaelmas was my first proper term after suspension, a term I am so grateful to have come back to and am so glad to have completed. I recognise so much of myself that now feels better, but there are parts of me I still cannot feel at all. My body spends so much time in its dissociative space, and although my own self-awareness of this is a comforter, there is still a sense of haunting. The broken me is not all dead, the recovered me not fully alive– the weeks flux from a healed engagement with life now, to bed days trapped in thinking patterns of my past.

Between my lapses, there are clear cuttings of hope. I glimpse them every time someone mentions my improving confidence, determination and just day-to-day capacity. Even without these comments, I recognise tangible changes in the way I view myself and my worries– I am capable of challenging intrusive thoughts, as well as recognising my worth to be undefined by them. Most days of the week I can exercise, shower and eat a good amount of food on top of my university studies. This is something I did not use to have even half the energy for, as well as something I am proud to remind myself of. In this context, it feels okay to understand myself as ‘recovered’ and returned to Oxford. I am my very own Spring after a stark and long-drawn Winter. However, within my increased capabilities some more taboo forms of management have snuck their way into my skill set. I am good at hiding my disorder, as well as my other mental health conditions. If I cannot be at my most high-functioning, I know how to ‘pass’ as doing fine: 

It is just as likely I emerge an echo of my ‘recovered’ self as I do my broken one. 

In all my presentations and versions of myself, I start to feel a complete fraud. I am not really that confident, but just excellent at suppressing. In fact, I am not good at that either, I have panic attacks spring upon me that I simply cannot hide. Simultaneously, I spend days hiding from my own thoughts as well as from friends, waiting in bed and hoping that at some point I’ll get the motivation to face them all. Then, when I am meant to go to sleep or at least rest, I find myself inexplicably abundant with energy. In these moments I start thinking that the idea of a ‘recovered’ me is–politely–bullshit. I am so inconsistent, so much of the time: even my echoes don’t seem to match up. 

All this frustration around who I am, was, and could be, is something that goes beyond the letters GAD. It is tied to human experience as well as trauma– it is my body in the midst of processing in order to keep letting go. This odd limbo is one I am still adapting to, as well as the simultaneous sensations of complete rawness into uncontrolled inauthenticity. The fact that I can experience these things and still pursue the degree I love feels miraculous at times, overwhelming at others. None of it makes sense, I don’t make sense, and yet here I am living through it almost joyfully. 

In spite of all this, there are parts of me I now know to be stone solid, they surfaced at my most unwell. Through the gaping void I often feel but rarely face, the chalk of my soul begins to write. It unites all I was and am and could be. When I am at my most exhausted, I hear soft rain and the smell of my aunt’s old bathroom. I remember the door lock and the heated tiles and making shampoo potions in my own blue bubble of secrecy. In the midst of my fatigue, I watch the snow fall from my parents’ first house, holding the teddy from my third birthday and curling into my mother’s silken hair. When I can’t remember anything I remember these soft, unchanging memories–

how they are more than just echo.