You know one of my favorite things about being on campus here at the University of Chicago is when you're walking around you are absolutely surrounded by Gothic architecture. And you know you're walking around you're thinking to yourself, where am I? You know am I in England, am I in France? And then you find yourself in this very Gothic archway and out of nowhere you see corn and you realize, no actually I am in the Midwest where I belong. There's something else I want to show you from this little archway here. This stone is the last remaining piece from the old University of Chicago. There was another University of Chicago founded in the 1850s. It was in a different neighborhood and it ran out of money and failed. And that's something I sometimes have to remind myself that this whole university, this whole elite university is a second try. So when I finished high school and started college I really revered my teachers and I wanted to do really really good work for them. Not just to impress them but to sort of do right by them, to show them how fascinating I found their classes and how much I learned from them. You know recently I was talking to a former TA of mine and he told me to remember that professors are just like normal humans. You know they poop and they worry about groceries. But that attitude that I had coming into college largely has not changed. And it hasn't helped me either because I have anxiety. Walk with me. My anxiety would flare up around finals weeks when I would have to sit alone in my room and write papers. And some people have one way of dealing with stress which is you work constantly and you just constantly focus on the thing that you're supposed to be doing. And frankly I am jealous of those people. My general method of dealing with stress was to freeze up and do nothing. I would dread the actual process of writing because when I was writing I could tell that what I was doing wasn't good enough to get that A or that kind comment from a professor. Now sometimes my anxiety would be overridden by the panic of an impending deadline and I would rush to my computer and just type. But sometimes I couldn't overcome my anxiety and I would wind up turning in papers late or not at all. And for a while not being able to finish work was something I was ashamed to talk about because it's something that didn't really go away for me. Along the way though I learned things that did help me. For one I learned how to not skip the things that I do were going to make me happy. For me that included going to therapy at student counseling, not skipping choir practice, hanging out at fourth meal with friends even if I had work to the next day. And also going out for walks just to get myself out of my room for a few hours or a few minutes every day. I also learned how to occasionally zoom out and remember all the things that I had accomplished over the years. While I was at college I wrote chapbooks of my own poetry. I wrote a BA thesis that I'm really proud of. And perhaps most importantly after a couple years certain kinds of assignments like five page papers didn't feel like such a big deal as much anymore. 10 and 15 page papers did but you know we're working on that. 3rd of all I had really kind generous professors who understood not only what I was going through but also how much effort I was putting into the class. I had one professor who flat out told me it was more important to him than I showed up in class and asked good questions than that I write papers. I had another professor who was slightly less understanding but who only took half a letter grade off of one of my late papers because she said I handled the topic so sincerely which is very sweet of her. And last of all I realized that my problems with anxiety and with not getting work done are actually really really common. I mean not just to use Chicago kids but to students everywhere. I probably could have titled this video college in my mental health but you know got to get that search engine optimization. I realized that everyone's mental health and mental illness experience is not the same and I realized that a lot of people have not had good experiences for example with therapy at student counseling. But the reason that I'm making this video is I am not ashamed to talk about my experiences anymore. And I hope more people will talk about their experiences too.