Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
After graduating from college, I lost a large portion of my sense of purpose and direction. I had worked for 22 years towards a degree and thought of little else along the way. The toll of this life change on my mental health eventually led me to therapy as my confusion, anxiety, and negative sense of self came to a boil.
The year I graduated, I was struggling in ways I never had and was not prepared for. My negative self-talk was growing increasingly worse and I was facing an unrelenting depression. I was exhausted. I was tired of feeling awful all of the time and I was painfully confused about why I was feeling the way that I did.
My Story
For most of my life, I believed that to manage the way I expressed my emotions, I had to go to the source and manage (or more like suppress) the emotion itself. This led me down a road of confusion and shame because after graduating, I finally became aware that this was impossible. And I felt like a failure for it. I thought something must be wrong with me for not being able to control my emotions.
I was taught that emotions like embarrassment, anger, frustration, and jealousy were counterproductive and not worth acknowledging. The message to me was that expressing these emotions didn’t have a positive impact on others. Therefore, it was best to keep them to myself and do my best to let them go and move on.
As I grew older, anytime I faced any negative emotions, my mind would kick in and tell me I had no right to feel this way. I’d tell myself that the person who hurt me didn’t mean it or there was no way to “fix” it. I judged myself too harshly and my mental health was rapidly deteriorating.
I Needed Help Coping with the Emotions of Graduating
My methods for ignoring or pushing down my feelings strongly impacted my ability to cope with an important life change. Being a student was a large part of my identity and that was no longer that case. And with the excitement and pride that comes with graduating, there is also a strong sense of anxiety and confusion. I wasn’t prepared for how I would feel.
Shortly after graduating, I was happy to land a position in an industry that I care about and wanted to grow in. I also moved into a new apartment and got to stay in the city that I had called home for the past four years. I still had friends nearby and family within driving distance. On the outside, I had very little to worry about.
But I was feeling worse and worse. When my struggles started to negatively impact some of my relationships, I decided therapy was probably a good idea. I was desperate for some relief and skeptical whether therapy would work, but I instinctively knew if I could feel safe enough to express the darker parts of myself that were hurting me, that might be relief enough.
Therapy Helped Me Grow Confident in My Emotions
Almost a year and half later, I’m still going to therapy consistently and feel all the more content for it. Therapy is as much practice and experimentation as it is talking about how you feel. Trained therapists give you tools. They listen to you while bringing in methods of managing and coping that require consistent practice.
One of the most freeing things I’ve learned in therapy is that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for how I feel. I refuse to make apologies for how I’m impacted by the world around me. I can and do feel however I want regardless of whether there was an event that directly caused the emotion. My feelings don’t have to necessitate or directly correlate with how I express them. I have control over how I express myself but I also have a responsibility to myself to honor how I feel. This is rarely easy, but well worth the peace and healing.
