Hey fellow hubskiers!

I wanted to post this because I feel like you guys are a pretty cool community and that you might appreciate this -- some of you may feel the same, some of you might have felt the same or some of you might not relate at all, but that's what I'm interested in.

I've always been a smart, although awkward, kid and from a couple of year ago (before graduating high school) I felt that I had life pretty much figured out. I knew what I wanted to do, I had a good relationship with myself, and I was quite good at managing my emotions and anxieties. I knew how to have fun, but I could buckle down and work hard if needed. I've worked physical jobs during the summer for the last couple and I've always been up to the task and even enthusiastic about them! In short, I've always been quite motivated to make something out of myself and I had some plans before I graduated high school.

I'm a year into university right now and I feel like I'm, right now, the complete opposite -- ok, maybe not complete, as I've recently started to refigure things out, but a couple of months ago I was. Somehow, I got lost. For good couple of months to maybe half a year, I didn't do anything, I missed all my classes, I slept all day and started smoking weed far too frequently than would be ok. And it wasn't that I didn't care, I just.. I couldn't care. No matter how much I forced myself to, I wasn't able to care. I've always been a pretty calm dude, never had anxiety and/or stress problems, but this was too much. It was as if I was on the strongest anti-depressants available -- I just didn't care.

At the end of last year I had a really bad drug related experience and, for a couple of months, I felt some of it's repercussions -- I had really bad anxiety for about a month, then slightly lower for about another month, then slightly lower, and so on until the point where I feel at the moment where I'm pretty much back to baseline.

These anxiety problems really changed my outlook on things though -- I had never experienced anxiety before, and even though I knew some people who did have anxiety and who had tried to explain it to me I could never have imagined what it was like. All the time I heard people talking about it, I thought I understood it but it never really clicked until I felt it on my own skin. Anyway, during those months I was somewhat depressed, and, when it was really bad, I thought about suicide. I'd never go through with it, I couldn't do that to my family and friends who cared so much for me and who'd be heartbroken -- and also, I never really felt the desire to myself -- how it was, at least for me, was simply feeling "Wouldn't it be better if I just stopped existing?". I'd be on the street and think to myself "I'd be fine with it if that car ran me over right now", or I'd be in the subway and I'd contemplate just slipping and falling in front of the oncoming metro.

I'd never had these thoughts and feelings before and, while I do realize now (as I did then) that they were simply the product of my present artificially heightened anxiety (due to the bad experience) and while I don't have these feelings anymore (I've been feeling great lately, back to normal) a part of me changed because I did. For some time I knew what it was like to have certain mental problems. Because of one experience I knew that, for some people with mental problems (chemical imbalances, etc.) hell is a real place, and they can't escape it. I know because I was there. And I'll never be able to unknow it.

And that brings me to the second part of the title -- growing up. Over the last half year I faced something that was completely and utterly new to my being -- something I had never faced before. It hit me hard in the beginning, but, alongside my brain restoring proper chemical balances I learned to deal with this new and strange feeling. And I learned that the world isn't as black and white as I thought it was, and that some problems are harder to solve than they may seem to at first. I suddenly realized that other people also sometimes have to deal with this, and that lead me to acknowledge a whole other dimension to people's personalities that I had never really considered before. In short, I grew. And while that may have been through a very arduous process, in the end I am a more complete and understanding person than I was before. For some time it's been harder to stay motivated than it was a couple of years ago, but I understand that that may also have something to do with growing up. Because understanding oneself is one of the hardest things for people to do and to be better at it is to grow up.

Nowadays I don't feel as lost anymore, and, if I still do every now and then I realize it's a passing feeling and that the world isn't always that hard. And somewhere along the way I learned to appreciate the miracle that is the fact that, for some strange occurrence in the universe I'm able to be here, thinking and typing my feelings, as a conscious being, into a computer so that people all over the world might (or might not) read it.

Anyway, if you've made it this far I thank you for reading through this. I don't have any great goal with this post other than to write about my experience because I feel writing things down helps me get my thoughts in order (even if my post was at times less coherent than I would've like it to have been), and if someone's going through something similar than maybe they'll find solace in the fact that someone, somewhere has gone through the same thing they have.