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“:I thought I blew it at 20″… Academic Struggles to Success

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hey i'm jose mourissajeski um i'm 24 years old i'm a student right now about to get my bachelor's degree um and and yeah my my life so far has been filled with academic struggles well you know what i actually had my struggles i would say aren't necessarily academic there with my mental health but they showed themselves through my academics and then my poor academics deal with my poor mental health Elementary School the first signs of this were when i was pretty young in elementary school i would always get the same classic note home every year from from every teacher they would write something along the lines of almost word for word for my parents hey uh your kid he's you know really smart really good but he just doesn't apply himself very smart but lazy because i guess that's just the natural answer the natural conclusion when you have someone that you think is intelligent but isn't performing well i guess High School reason high school very very very bad lots of c's and d's i almost didn't graduate high school days before walking the stage for graduation i'm frantically writing emails my emails essays i'd write like 10 essays for this online course getting the graduating barely but internally i'm like i know i'm i do love learning i love academics this is for me by this point in my life at the end of high school i'm realizing other things about myself and my mental health like like i have really bad anxiety and depression and and so i'm kind of like trying to connect certain dots and i'm like okay maybe you might exactly depression is why i can't follow through in school maybe something about having a bunch of assignments makes me so anxious that i shut down that from the outside looking in it looks like laziness because because i would sit down at the computer i have 10 things to do and then instead of doing any of them i would go lie down you know go back to bed or something and so it was hard to it was hard to even realize for myself like that that's not laziness i'm not just sitting down laying down because i want to lay down i'm laying down because i'm having you know an increased heart rate i'm feeling nauseous stick to my stomach [Music] and that's a really frustrating thing to have to explain to people because again from the outside looking in they only see that you're not doing the work [Music] College i i constantly had like this uh tip on my shoulders i did like because i have to prove to people and to myself that i can you know succeed and for whatever reason i decided that the best way to do that would be to take on the hardest thing that i could uh because you know if i could do this then everyone will see that and they'll be like oh he is actually a smart guy not lazy so i found a very difficult major [Music] uh actuarial science and i went to college i got into a college that had very minimal uh acceptance qualifications but yeah and then when i got there i took on a more than a full load of classes and it resulted in disaster how bad were your grades i have multiple semesters with straight and were you partying a lot during that time were you still trying hard uh funny enough as much as i was at a party school and i would like to attribute my failures to you know me being super cool and partying and having fun i did not really party i went to a couple parties i think in my entire career at that school yeah i know instead of partying i stayed up late you know crying and waking up in cold sweats freaking out wondering i'm gonna put it all together um and uh and lying so i spent a lot of energy lying to myself and i could get real creative with my lives too it's kind of amazing what you can do when you learn ways that you can convince yourself for something to to save your feelings i guess for example one common tactic that i would use every semester and it always works without fail is uh at the beginning of every semester you know you get a syllabus with the breakdown of your grade you know 30 on the final 20 from the midterm 10 from this assignment 10 from that assignment and so every time i would say miss an assignment or fail to study for a midterm i would be able to open up the the syllabus do some quick math and say hey you know midterms only 20 of my grade all i have to do is knock out you know 10 points on it and i could still get a b in the class that's not that bad and then you know two weeks later the next quiz is coming up and i'm like yeah it's only five percent of my grade i don't need to study for that of course that makes no sense and if you just eliminate 30 of your grade that means on the rest of the class including the final you need to get a hundred percent on everything but i was very good at ignoring those kinds of facts depression and anxiety um i ended up getting diagnosed because i was having eating problems i lost a lot of weight um the dorm that i was living in on campus i had like a communal food court you know communal area and every time i would go outside of my dorm to eat you know be around all my peers i would get so anxious that i'd get sick to my stomach and i couldn't eat uh which was a problem because we had limited uh access to the food court so if i go to the food court and don't eat then i just wasted one swipe of my of my food card and that just happened way too much i lost so much weight because every time i went to the food court i would want to throw up and i mean i'd sit down for like 90 minutes two hours uh just waiting like for for myself to chill out so i can you know maybe have a salad or something uh and so that's when my i finally spoke to my doctor and he decided to put me on something for it i was basically put on an antidepressant that did its job i guess it kind of inhibited my anxiety but it had a slew of other side effects that were undesirable [Music] like a fatigue a mental and physical fatigue and i wouldn't say that my doctor prepared me to understand that that was going to be a side effect so this is kind of detrimental because [Music] because here you know i already have this um predisposition to thinking that i'm lazy i'm already very self-conscious about that idea uh and so when i started taking this drug and i didn't really know like it's gonna make me physically fatigued and now all of a sudden in the middle of every single day i crash and i feel like i need to take naps like i would literally feel like i need to take naturals randomly so eventually i just took myself off the drug [Music] yeah i really noticed it was a breaking point when i would get up in the morning head over to my laptop open up my email maybe or just look at anything and anything i'd open anything i'd want to do i i see a massive list of things that i've missed over the last two weeks all the assignments i've missed all the professors that have tried to reach out to me because i've missed the last four lectures and so you know i see all that and say this is a problem how can we alleviate the the the stress and the pain of looking through all of the looking through all of this and of course there's the right option and that's you know call your grandparents and tell them how you're really doing email your professor tell them why you haven't been to class but that's really really hard it was inconceivable as an option to me and so that's when my mind would get just a bit more creative and say maybe i find myself looking out the window of my apartment or you know hanging out on the balcony and you don't have to be very creative to come up with say some faster ways to alleviate your pain in that situation [Music] Back Home and so i ended up having to complain about everything i dropped out of school went back home with mom and dad felt like an absolute failure i took a bit of time off school i sat out the next semester and i immediately got a Working i was washing dishes you know in a nice restaurant which uh sucked it was bad it was pretty bad um i will say [Music] that it was a really important step for me because along with being home with me with my parents i i just got and working in this restaurant i got to meet a lot of people and having to work washing dishes i was forced every day to go out and interact with people you know people are counting on me to do a job as opposed to when i'm in school you know i get to get and convince myself that you know i'm only hurting myself so i never felt responsible for missing classes um but at work i had this i have to go to work i can't i can't just work because there are people that i like that i respect counting them to to do my job even though you know i'm just washing dishes it doesn't matter like if so that's important of a job in a restaurant i would ruin people's evenings if i didn't show up to work [Music] which is good that was good pressure and it got me up out of bed to to get a job no matter what the job was it got me to go do something every day Community College [Music] took a semester off school i enrolled at a community college local um and so after a few months of just washing dishes um i i did return to taking some classes and this time i actually did take a few classes at a time and honestly the only reason i did that was because i was working and so it really didn't make sense to take a pull up [Music] how did you fare in those classes did you do the same things and couldn't get work done or somehow just miraculously thinks about it so i had extra motivation this time because i hated washing dishes so much that whenever i thought about missing an assignment or missing a lecture i think about how much i hate washing dishes until you know midnight one in the morning i was immediately faced with kind of the same [Music] the same roadblocks that i was used to you know i would i would get my assignments and feel overwhelmed and i would be so tempted to pull out that syllabus and figure out what if i missed this assignment can still pass but i i just decided i'm not going to let myself fall down that path and at this point i'm taking on as many classes as i was at university and i'm working a lot like 25 to 30 hours a week at a restaurant and before i know it you know i'm a week after the semester week past the semester and i'm at work and i'm going on my break and my phone buzzes and i get an email i don't know maybe my grades at this point i can barely even grasp that semester's [Music] [Music] congratulations so they uh your performance this semester blah blah blah you've been selected to you know be awarded the dean's list award and i don't know exactly what the requirements are for that award but i assume they're good uh [Music] so i immediately went to my car thankfully i was on break so i could do this and i cried a lot [Music] and i just keep it going so you know next semester same result dean's list and so finally i'm in this position where you know i i have that option do i go back to university do i first or pursue a four-year degree i ended up going to cal state los angeles i spend a few semesters there and and i continue performing well but at some point i think in like my third semester at university um my depression and anxiety had looked really really hard i was in enough of a dark place to see therapy three out of five times i would describe something and she my therapist would give me like a ah and i thought what what what is going on and eventually she said you're you know you're describing a bunch of things and i know you have anxiety and depression but a lot of these issues you're describing are not related to any dietary depression and eventually she told me she's like dude you have you have really bad adhd so i guess for the first 20 years of your life nobody ever mentioned the positive adhd even during that official diagnosis whereas they'll definitely have depression but just somehow adhd just went like under the radar would i imagine hyperactivity to be is someone in a conversation and then and then as you're talking to them they see like a butterfly moving over there and they go oh butterfly and then they'd run to chase the butterfly [Music] and i'd also imagine someone being really rude in class for example like let's say a teacher is like a child like a child in class making noises and throwing things and i guess i guess the reason i didn't see myself and no one else saw me is because i was like i was hyperactive but i was a well-behaved child you

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What an Expert Says

In this YouTube video <https://youtu.be/Oc0suB3SESk>, Dr. Seema Sehgal, a practicing psychiatrist with over 25 years of experience, is interviewed on the Rcoz platform about social anxiety. She explains that social anxiety is a specific disorder where people's anxiety escalates during everyday interactions, causing severe embarrassment and self-consciousness. This disorder can impact relationships, work performance, and lead to isolation and substance use. The age group most likely to experience it is between 13 and 23 years old. Dr. Sehgal also discusses when it is appropriate to seek professional help for social anxiety and the symptoms that indicate the need for treatment. #socialanxiety #mentalhealth #psychiatry #anxietydisorders #functioning #treatmentoptions

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