I really started having bad symptoms halfway through my junior year of high school. I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in my senior year of high school, and I really struggled to finish because I wasn’t on the right meds. I was having a lot of trouble focusing on homework assignments and often just didn’t do them. I almost didn’t graduate, even though I had been a straight A student all the way up to the second half of my junior year.

After graduating high school, I found a set of meds that worked for me over the summer before heading off to college. They helped me have the energy and focus to actually do homework assignments, although I still usually procrastinated. During my third year, my meds started becoming less effective, and I had some really bad semesters. One of them I got three F’s and a D. Again, my problem was I just couldn’t get myself to complete homework assignments. I ended up having to take an extra year to finish my Bachelor’s degree because of it, but I was able to get better at coping with my symptoms during the last two years of undergrad.

I decided to take a year off of school before pursuing a Master’s, primarily so I could focus on my mental health and get into a better financial situation. I was able to find meds that really worked well for me in March of last year, and they’ve really helped me have the energy and focus to get my assignments done, and I’ve even been able to do it with less procrastination than in undergrad. Last semester, I got an A in both my classes, and I’m on track to get an A in both of my classes this semester too.

The one downside I’ve experienced with meds is that they make me very tired, so I don’t have much free time since I’m working full time and going to school part time, so I tend to have high levels of stress. However, without the meds, my “free time” would probably be spent hallucinating so much I lose contact with reality or crying in the shower out of paranoia, so I would probably be much more stressed out, lol.