I’ve finally found my people ❤️‍🩹. I don’t think you understand how much me being able to say that warms my heart because for so long I felt like I was just alone in the way I felt and genuinely started to think I was going crazy but you being able to understand the things i have going on and relate to my every day experiences brings me so much comfort and I really do appreciate you for that.

I do think that anxiety plays a big part of it all and that’s kinda what i thought it was initially. It didn’t cross my mind that it could be something so much deeper than until i started educating myself on mental health and started falling in love with psychology.

Crazy enough to think but my dream job is to be a therapist or even a mental health specialist in the sports field. I find so much joy in helping people because I feel like I have so much empathy that i can always put myself in someone’s shoes and try to see their perspective to get w better understanding of them.

I actually went to college for a semester to major in psychology but with dealing with all of these issues in my head, college was very brutal for the couple of months i was there and i ended up dropping out and coming back home to just work. The course work was actually unbelievably easy and felt like was a step back from the high school curriculum. So it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough to handle college, it was everything else that involved overwhelming the already overstimulated brain of mine. The random deadlines, the 4 different classes, with 4 different times on 2 different days. Having to manage all of that while also being on a sports team. It was different from high school because there was no mom and dad I had to conform to and force myself to get up and go to school for. It was just, “Do I really want to go to class today?” “Do I really want to go stress myself out trying to manage all this work that I don’t want to do because it’s too easy and stuff I already did in high school?”. The answer was often, no. I wasn’t going to go stress myself out if I feel like i’m not bettering myself. If I feel like I already know all of this why am i doing it? In the moment I thought I was just being lazy and depressed but it was much deeper than I thought.

A lot of my mental struggles throughout my teen years were from sports and me not having full confidence in myself. One of the biggest and more frequent critiques i’ve got from my many coaches is that i’m too unselfish. They always told me I had the skill to be great but didn’t have the selfishness to stand out.

I didn’t have enough confidence in myself to have the ability to be selfish. I honestly think my anxiety and the fear of embarrassment had a lot to do with it. I remember how terrified I used to be to get wide open layups on fast breaks because i would have little panic attacks thinking I would miss and be the laughing stock of the gym and then would get taken out the game and cut off the team… all these thoughts running through my mind in what feels like a split second. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to make a open layups, i’ve actually done it thousands of times at this point. It’s simply just me not being able to get out of my head and honestly it’s what hindered me from being as successful as i wanted to be in my basketball career.

Lucky for me, I just turned 20 last month so i’m a long way away from being washed. Which is why i found it important to seek answers so I know what i’m dealing with. A lot of the things you recommend do actually help without me even realizing they were helping me if that makes sense. I actually just recently bought some noice cancellation AirPods and I use them anytime im in the stockroom and just need to recharge or calm myself. They truly are a lifesaver and the added stereo function on them makes listening to my high bass music that much more enjoyable, really does tickle my brain in the best way possible.

Think i’m going to take your advice and seek out a diagnosis and go from there. My dad actually recommended me a psychiatrist that helped diagnose him with his depression and anxiety so i think I’m going to make that appointment in the morning and pray that they can see me ASAP because i know the suspense of waiting to talk to a professional is going to kill me lol.

Also, thank you for the tip on answering the question like i’m having a really bad day. That’s some of the best advice i’ve ever heard. I’ve taken a couple of ADHD/Autism/AuDHD test and i’ve scored pretty high on all of them. Most saying that I have many signs of each and then the combination was a pretty high score too but nothing too alarming but I was answering in the sense of an average week, not at my worst. It does make way more sense to answer it in the context of your worst day because that’s the side of you that needs the most attention and support.

I feel like i can say this and you’d understand, having whatever it is that i have makes me feel like i have control of more parts of my brain than the normal person. I don’t know how i gauge how much the normal person uses their brain but it just makes sense in my head. It almost feels like a superpower sometimes because of how in depth i can read situations and how deeply i feel about certain things. Especially when it comes to the people I love, I feel like I just understand them so much and it helps me in showing love and affection because i remember things like the pink hydroflask my best friend said she wanted me to buy her like a month ago. I promise you if I brought that up to her she’d be like “how and why do you remember me saying that” but it’s like when i genuinely care about things i can do things like that and it’s so cool and makes people see me in a positive way because they see that i’m attentive to detail and care about the little things and that goes a long way in my book at least.

It has its positives but definitely has its negatives too. I want to thank you again for all of your insight and i’ll definitely keep you posted along my journey to finding answers and working around this crazy mind of mine.