Hello, it is my first time talking openly about this. I never talked to anyone about what’s been going on for the last year and a half. 

To give you guys some context, I am 19 years old and just started my freshmen year in university. I moved alone 1,800 km from home and currently live in a shared apartment. 

Mentally speaking 2020 was the worst year I ever experienced. I've always had phases in which I felt bad but they lasted for only two moths tops. I graduated high school in July of 2020 and decided to take the year off before studying abroad. The reason for this was mostly corona, but also because I wanted to sort things out with myself before starting a new chapter in my life. This decision however made me feel incredibly guilty since my family did not approve. I couldn’t enjoy the free time I had neither to focus on my art nor on myself because of that crushing feeling of guilt. 

I'm pretty sure I have some sort of anxiety disorder (for various reasons that I’m not going to talk about in this post) , I never got the chance to talk to a professional though. I have been struggling with anxiety for as long as i can remember and i've never been able to maintain a long or close friendship because of it. Thus, I have no one to talk to about my mental state. My family is not a choice in this matter either. 

The whole year of 2020 I had occasional panic attacks that got triggered mostly in the middle of the night. Sometimes they get so bad that I think I’m going to die. I don’t know why though. I don’t know what the trigger is. I wake up and I realise that my heart rate in really high and that I have trouble breathing and from there the process just feeds on itself. I completely isolated myself from everyone and everything which made me more of a black sheep in the family than I already was. 

In 2021 I got a job, which somewhat forced me to step out of my comfort zone and after i applied to uni and it was set in stone that i was going, I started to feel better. I still had heavy anxiety but I was motivated to work on it on my own. However, I’m one month into my "new life" and I feel like I’m falling into old patterns. I have trouble getting my work done because I can’t focus, I spend all day in my room avoiding situations that might make me feel anxious (for example going to the bathroom or cooking, which leads me to eat little to almost nothing in a day) and I’m isolating myself again, struggling to maintain or form new relationships. I also still struggle with guilt. I feel guilty about everything, from eating a piece of chocolate to going to bed after 10 pm, while feeling that I’m unable to take responsibility for any mistake I make. 

I feel so lonely, worthless and lazy. I feel like there is so much pressure and i fail to comprehend how people deal with normal, every day situations. I’m not gonna lie, I'd rather just disappear. 

I had my first panic attack in almost 10 months this weekend and I’m terrified that what happened in 2020 will start all over again. I can’t bring myself to seek professional help either because i don’t have the means for that and I’m ashamed to tell my family or mentor in school about it.