Returning to School After a Nervous Breakdown
If you are anything like me, you probably assumed your future had already ended. I pictured myself locked inside a mental institution for the rest of my life, and that really could have happened if I had kept listening to the negative voice in my head. Giving in to it felt easier than pushing back. Meanwhile my friends were walking across stages at their college graduations while I sat at home, or in a hospital, feeling like a stranger inside my own body. Depressed. Anxious. Unable to step into a public place without a panic attack waiting for me. The idea that I would ever be stable enough to go back to school seemed laughable.
Most of us have lived through a stretch where hope for getting better simply isn't visible. We define our whole reality by the failures we keep replaying. That part matters: how we feel shapes what runs through our heads. Whether or not you take medication, the brain hands you thoughts you didn't ask for, and you get to decide whether to spiral with them or sit with them and let them pass. I'd ask you to think about returning to school through that same lens.
School was a source of real trauma for me, nothing like the version other students seem to carry out of their college years. I didn't finish on time. I had become someone I didn't like, yet I had no choice but to keep living with her. Being away from campus made me certain I'd forgotten how to be a student, and I wondered whether I could even survive without my parents nearby.
So what did I actually find out? I am not a woman in her thirties or forties coming back after a decade away, the way my mother did. It has been two years since my psychotic break. Maybe some people would say that's too fast. My doctors see it differently: the sooner I rejoin ordinary life, the sooner I'll understand that a good life is possible even with my illness.
There turned out to be far more fields of study tied to who I am than I'd ever guessed. Part of that is scale. Regis was tiny, so the list of majors we saw was short. The California State schools are enormous by comparison, and genuinely impressive. Still, a small place like Regis saved me from myself. The friends I made there anchored me enough that I didn't act on the suicidal urges as often as they pulled at me. A small campus could reach the real version of me right when I most needed to be in a classroom.
Even after two years off, setting foot on a campus again feels foreign. Not having the faces I knew in Colorado around me every day is strange. But a brand new environment turns out to be its own kind of fuel. I can take part in class now. I follow ideas more easily. I don't grumble about assignments the way I did as a younger student. Being even a little older than you were when you first started college is a hidden gift. Looking after yourself matters, and I hope that arriving at college later teaches you what an education is actually worth. You stop caring about fitting in, and you discover that friends show up while you're doing the least expected things.
Enjoy being young. Name your diagnosis out loud and then hold onto the fact that you've been handed a second chance. Nobody stripped your real life away from you. We tend to pin everything we think we lost on the illness, when often we're the ones shutting out what we've decided the reality must be. Reality gets built inside our own heads. When it comes down to it, we're usually the only ones capable of granting ourselves that second chance. We're the ones who have hit the ground a thousand times and can still get up and meet the world head on.
If you aren't there yet, don't let that rattle you. I might be making my recovery sound like something simple, but it has been hard, and I'm thankful it was. Nothing in life comes easy, and college never will either, though I'm sure that asking for help early was the smartest thing I ever did. People still misread me. Some friends have gone quiet. Being young means a whole life stretches out in front of me, a blank book waiting to be filled. Maybe it'll mix drama, tragedy, comedy and love. We'll find out.