4/25/2023
I'm stuck in a staring contest I didn't consent to joining. I'm not sure when he started to see me; maybe he was always there. At first, I didn't know what it was. I would find myself rubbing off the mirror and be surprised when the object shown next to my reflection was still there. It looked like nothing more than a speck of dust that wouldn't go away. It wasn't big, wasn't big at all, but there was something daunting about it's persistence to exist. Even when it was too far away for my brain to piece together it's form, I was still terrified. I think it started to show up in sophomore year of college. Did you know I was going to be a doctor, before all of this? If I reminisce on that too much it might make me spiral again, so let me move on. As I was saying, I believe it was my sophomore year of college. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened and honestly, if anything, the last year and a half had been the most mundane thing I've ever experienced. I was scared for college when I first went. Looking back, I'm not sure why I was so terrified. I found myself curling up in my bed my senior year of high school, frantically making it through all the Best Things To Know Before Going To College videos and articles I would find. I think that when you are in high school they talk about college as if it's this fantastical thing, something that couldn't possibly exist in this reality. All of the teachers would talk in this way and then once you get to college you realize the professors in college actually view your existence as one of a human being's, something all of my high school teachers failed to do. Finding out what you thought was true to be completely false can shatter your worldview on a lot of other things, which is what happened to me and caused my slow spiral into anxiety. I was the first in my family to go to college so I had no idea what to expect other than the awful things the teachers would echo anytime a student nodded off. I said that I was terrified to start college but when I think about it more, I think it's stupid to even compare what I was feeling there to genuine terror. I've experienced that now.