This Too Shall Pass

Sophomore Biomedical Engineering major.

This depression, anxiety, sadness, or desperation that you are feeling, it will go away. Your life should have a happy ending. Do everything in your power to make sure your life has a happy ending. Life goes by fast; live it the best way you can. This too shall pass.

“Don’t complain, some people have it way worse than you.” This statement gets thrown around in our society more often than curse words do. We attempt to put our problems into perspective, but all this really does is belittle our own importance. Yes, people are suffering everywhere around the world, in unimaginable, disturbing ways. If others are hurting, does that mean we need to sacrifice our own feelings and thoughts?

This is something I have struggled with for quite a long time. I made sure never to make my problems a big deal, because someone else always had it worse than me. This ideology was tested last semester. I was on co-op in Warsaw, Indiana, where I did not have many friends and I was completely separated from the college atmosphere of UC. I missed it desperately. I missed having my friends around and being around what was familiar to me. When I first decided to take this co-op and move to Warsaw, I thought I could handle living that far from almost everyone I knew. Through the semester, I realized that I need people around me; my extroverted nature prompts me to be this way. Being so alone may not be such a big deal for other people. For me, it was extremely difficult.

The separation from everything and everyone put me in a depressed state. Being so alone in such a secluded place gave me anxiety. The company I was working in was fairly large, but I was the only co-op in my department. To top it all off, I was living separately from all the co-ops, so my interaction with people in general was limited to the 8-5 workday. I started to exercise excessively, 3 to 4 times a day, to keep my mind off of the fact that I was so desperately lonely. Even when my legs would scream in pain when I was running or when I could not move in the morning because I was so sore. I ignored all of these things, because once I addressed these problems, I would have to deal with everything else.

I have never been the one to cry much to release tensions. I never prayed or talked to God to help ease my emotions. God’s identity in my life has been a big fat question mark. My whole religious quest to find God has always led me to become more confused than I was before. Now, this is said to give more information about where I was religiously at in that point of my life.

There was a night in Warsaw that was particularly sad for me, the reasons for which are slipping my mind at the moment. I cried for 7 hours straight. Every time I gained control and my tears paused, I would think of something else that set me off. All the internalized emotions, all the deep sadness from the semester came pouring out like water from a faucet; there was no stopping me. As a final attempt to comfort myself, I prayed to God, after 7 years of not praying at all. I decided to talk to God, because I did not know what else to do. Well, I did not talk to God; I talked to whoever was up there, anybody that might be listening. I asked them to save me; they needed to help me get through this co-op. I told them that I tried my best to be brave, but I needed their support. As a conclusion to this weak prayer, I asked them to give me a sign that everything was going to be ok; I needed a physical sign that I was going to make it through.

I woke up the next morning with one thought in my head: “This too shall pass”. It was a random phrase, and it almost seemed silly to me. I had never read or heard that phrase before in my life, but I did not think much of it. I started my morning ritual by taking my Whole30 book and reading the next chapter. The Whole30 is a 30 day diet that changed my life the first time I did it, and I decided to read the book in preparation for my second time of doing it. Reading this book was one of the few aspects of my life that I still enjoyed doing. I turned to a random page in the book, much further into the book than I actually was reading. As I looked at this random page, the first sentence I read in the middle was “This too shall pass”, the same statement that I woke up thinking that morning. I stared at that part for about 10 minutes, just letting it sink in. As I mentioned before, I was never the one to believe in “signs from God” or miracles. Before that moment, I was the one to doubt everything that had anything remotely to do with signs or miracles. In that moment though, I truly believed in my heart that God was talking to me, in the only way that I would listen. I realized from that experience that there was somebody listening up there, someone, something, and they cared about me. They knew I could survive this. If they believed in me, even after all those years of me not even paying attention to them, then why couldn’t I care about myself?

I had a decision to make. I could either bask in my own depression, or I could learn from this experience and not ruin my whole life because of it. I decided to choose the latter. Life is filled with wonderful and horrible experiences. It all passes. The sadness, depression, happiness, and pleasure all passes. Enjoy the good things; learn from the bad things. After realizing this, my life started to pick up. I realized that this co-op in Warsaw was my low-point. I loved the people I worked with and I got close with a few other co-ops, but, overall, it was a point in my life that I do not want to relive. I learned and I moved on.

So, as a conclusion to my seemingly too good to be true happy ending story, I would like to speak directly to anyone struggling. To those that are confused about their identity, drowning in their sorrow, lost from their path, or just don’t want to get out of bed because they are too depressed to move: it gets better. Hope is not a myth; happiness is attainable. Don’t get me wrong, it will take hard work. There are times that I wake up in the middle of the night jolting awake because I had a nightmare about being in Warsaw. You have to admit to yourself that you have a problem. Once you do that, everything else will not seem as bad. When you are doing everything you can to help yourself, I want you to remember what I am telling you. Life has a happy ending; don’t let anyone convince yourself otherwise. It is ok to admit that you have a problem; you are not belittling anyone else’s problems by helping yourself become a better person. This depression, anxiety, sadness, or desperation that you are feeling, it will go away. Your life should have a happy ending. Do everything in your power to make sure your life has a happy ending. Life goes by fast; live it the best way you can. This too shall pass.