I’m Still Here, I Just Don’t Feel Like Me: High-Functioning Depression in Medical School & the Reality of Still Showing Up

I think I have been slipping for a while.

I do not really know when it started.

I wish I could give you a neat little timeline.

Here was the day I was okay. Here was the moment something changed. Here was the exact point when I realized I was slipping into a depressive episode.

But that is not how it happened.

It was quieter than that.

For a while, everything had an explanation.

I was tired because I am a medical student. I was overwhelmed because I had an exam coming up. I did not want to do anything because I had been studying all day. I was not answering people because I was busy. I was not keeping up with little things because there were more important things that needed my attention.

I just needed to get through this week. Then the next one. Then the next exam. There was always a reason.

And individually, most of those reasons made sense.

Medical school is exhausting. Exams are stressful. There are absolutely days when I want to close my laptop, disappear into a book, and speak to approximately no one.

That is not exactly breaking news.

But eventually, enough little things started collecting that I could not explain all of them away anymore.

I started noticing that I was not just tired. I was withdrawing.

Things that normally felt easy started requiring more effort. Things I usually enjoyed were not reaching me in quite the same way. I felt less present in my own life.

And there is something deeply unsettling about recognizing that shift while it is happening.

Because I have had difficult weeks before. I have been overwhelmed. I have been burnt out.

I have cried over exams, questioned whether I was smart enough to be here, stared at practice questions as though I had never encountered the human body before in my life, and occasionally decided that the only medically appropriate intervention was to close the laptop and go to bed.

Medical school and I have been through some things.

This felt different.

Not necessarily louder. Just heavier.

And I think that is part of what made it so easy to ignore at first.

We tend to imagine mental health struggles as something obvious.

A breaking point. A dramatic collapse. A moment when someone simply cannot keep going.

Sometimes it looks like that.

But sometimes you keep going. You get out of bed. You study. You take the exam. You answer a message. You laugh when something is funny. You have conversations. You make plans. You do enough of the things you are “supposed” to do that even you can convince yourself you must be okay.

Meanwhile, something inside you is getting quieter.

That is closer to what this has felt like for me.

And eventually I had to admit something I really did not want to admit: I think I am slipping into a depressive episode.

Even writing that sentence feels vulnerable.

Partly because this is happening now.

This is not a story I am telling six months later with a beautiful retrospective understanding of what happened, what fixed it, and what I learned.

I do not have the montage yet.

There is no scene where I start drinking enough water, clean my room, go for a sunrise walk, journal for twenty minutes, and emerge mysteriously healed while an inspirational song plays in the background.

Frankly, rude. I would love the montage.

Instead, I am somewhere in the middle.

I am recognizing patterns. I am trying to pay attention to myself. I am trying to be honest with the people who care about me. I am trying to figure out what I need while still existing inside a life that has not stopped requiring things from me.

And I think that is part of why I wanted to write about this now.

There was a part of me that wondered whether I should wait.

Maybe I should write about depression once I am feeling better. Maybe I should wait until I can tell you exactly what helped. Maybe difficult things are only worth talking about once you have turned them into something useful.

But that started to feel dishonest.

Because the middle is where people live too.

There are people sitting in lectures while struggling. There are people showing up to work while struggling. There are people answering “I'm good” because explaining the actual answer feels exhausting. There are people accomplishing things they are proud of while simultaneously feeling like something inside them is slipping away.

And I wonder how many of them assume that because they are still functioning, they are not struggling enough to deserve help.

I think I have fallen into that trap too.

There is always someone doing worse. There is always another responsibility. There is always something that feels more urgent than stopping long enough to ask yourself whether you are actually okay.

Especially in medicine, where functioning can become its own strange form of evidence.

I went to class, so I must be okay. I studied today, so I must be okay. I took the exam, so clearly I am managing.

Except functioning and being okay are not synonyms.

I am learning that again. And right now, I do not have a profound lesson to tie neatly around that realization.

I just know that I have been struggling. I know that pretending I have not been is not helping me. And I know that I do not want to wait until I am completely falling apart before deciding that what I am feeling deserves care.

So this week, instead of the post I had planned about perfectionism, we are talking about this.

Not because I have conquered it. Not because I know exactly what comes next. And definitely not because I think I have all the answers.

I am writing because I think there is value in saying: I am having a hard time right now.

No inspirational ending attached. No lesson required. Just the truth.

And if you have been quietly having a hard time too, maybe neither of us needs to pretend quite so much this week.

The Strange Thing About High-Functioning Depression

I think one of the hardest things for me to reconcile right now is the fact that I am still functioning.

Maybe not exactly like myself. Maybe not as easily. But functioning.

I still get up. I still go to class. I still study. I still take exams. I still laugh at things that are funny and get excited about books and have moments where, for a little while, everything feels almost normal.

And there is a strange part of my brain that wants to use all of that as evidence against everything else I am feeling.

See? You are fine.

You studied today. You made dinner. You got something done. You laughed so hard you cried over something ridiculous. You spent an unreasonable amount of time emotionally invested in the decisions of fictional people.

Clearly, everything is fine.

Case closed.

Except that is not really how this works.

I think somewhere along the way I created an image in my head of what struggling is supposed to look like. And apparently, according to the completely unqualified psychiatrist living in my brain, if I am still accomplishing things, then I cannot possibly be struggling that much.

Which is an interesting standard to set when you are in medical school.

Because medical school teaches you how to keep moving.

There is always another lecture. Another question bank. Another exam. Another deadline. Another thing that needs to be learned before you can even properly panic about the next thing that needs to be learned.

You become very good at functioning because, in a lot of ways, you have to. And sometimes I think that makes it harder to recognize when functioning is costing you significantly more than it normally does.

From the outside, studying for three hours looks like studying for three hours.

Nobody sees how long it took you to convince yourself to start. Nobody sees how many times you stared at the screen without absorbing anything. Nobody sees the negotiations happening inside your own head over things that usually would not require a negotiation at all.

Get up. Open the laptop. Answer the message. Take a shower. Make something to eat. Just do this one thing.

And then, when you finally do it, there is this temptation to look at the completed task and decide that you must have been exaggerating how difficult it felt.

But the fact that you managed to do something does not erase how much it took to do it.

I think my recent exams made that especially clear to me.

I had both an OSCE and a modular exam, and I performed really well on both of them.

They were results I had worked incredibly hard for. Results I should have been excited about. Especially because I had walked away carrying all of the usual post-exam uncertainty, replaying things in my head, wondering what I had missed, and preparing myself for results that might not look the way I hoped.

Normally, finding out that I had done well would have brought this enormous wave of relief. Pride. That little moment of Oh my God, I actually did it.

But this time, it barely registered.

Not because I did not care. If anything, I had cared so much that I had completely run myself down preparing for them.

I studied because there was an exam coming. I prepared because I needed to perform. I kept pushing because stopping did not really feel like an option. There wasn't much thought involved beyond: this needs to be done.

So I did it.

And then I did the next thing. And the next.

By the time I got the results I had been working toward, there was not much left in me to celebrate them.

My brain didn't say: Look what you did. It said: Good. That's what you were supposed to do.

And almost immediately: What's next?

That bothered me more than I expected.

Because I know myself. I know how much those moments usually mean to me. I know how nervous I get before assessments and how much relief I normally feel when I realize that all of that preparation actually paid off. I know what it feels like to be proud of myself.

And suddenly, something I had worked incredibly hard for just felt like another thing I had completed. Another box checked. Another expectation met. Another thing I was supposed to do.

That was one of the moments when I really started paying attention.

Because objectively?

I was functioning beautifully. I studied. I showed up. I performed well. I kept moving.

If achievement were the only measurement we used, there would be absolutely nothing to worry about.

But internally, I had run myself into the ground to produce those results and then could not access the happiness I thought would be waiting for me when I got there.

And I think that is one of the strangest things about struggling while you are still highly functional.

Sometimes the evidence everyone else can see says you are thriving. Your grades are good. Your responsibilities are getting done. You show up where you are supposed to be. Maybe you are even accomplishing things that a previous version of yourself would have been incredibly proud of.

Meanwhile, you are wondering why none of it feels the way you thought it would.

There can still be good moments, too.

That is important to me. I still laugh. I still read books that completely consume me. I still have conversations that make me feel like myself for a little while. I still experience excitement and connection and genuine happiness.

Those moments are not fake just because I am also struggling. But sometimes they make the whole thing more confusing.

Because when you have a genuinely good night or laugh until your stomach hurts or get excited about something you love, a little voice appears: See? You're fine.

And then the moment passes. The heaviness comes back. And suddenly you are wondering which version of your experience you are supposed to believe.

I think we like clean categories.

Okay or not okay. Functioning or falling apart. Happy or depressed. Productive or struggling.

But human beings are inconveniently terrible at fitting into clean categories.

You can be proud of yourself and exhausted by yourself. You can love your life and have a hard time living inside it. You can be grateful for where you are and still be struggling. You can know exactly what you want for your future and have days when getting through the present feels unusually difficult.

Those things do not cancel each other out.

I love medicine. I still want forensic pathology with every ridiculous, pathology-obsessed part of me. I still have dreams that excite me. I still recognize the life I have worked incredibly hard to build.

So there is a part of me that asks: How can I be depressed when there is so much in my life that I love?

But depression is not a referendum on whether your life is good enough.

It does not mean you are ungrateful. It does not mean everything around you is wrong. And it certainly does not mean you have to stop loving the things you love before you are allowed to acknowledge that you are struggling.

Sometimes the life around you can still be beautiful while something inside you is having a difficult time experiencing it.

And maybe that is why I almost missed what was happening. Because I kept waiting for struggling to look like stopping.

I thought if things were really getting bad, surely I would not be able to study. Surely I would not be able to take an exam. Surely I would not still perform well. Surely I would not have moments of happiness. Surely somebody else would notice. Surely there would be some unmistakable sign that said: Hey. You should probably pay attention to this.

There was not.

There was just me, slowly realizing that things felt harder than they were supposed to. And realizing that I had been using my ability to perform as proof that I was okay.

I do not want to do that anymore.

Because apparently, I can be struggling and still do well. I can be exhausted and still prepare. I can feel disconnected from myself and still show up when something is expected of me. I can accomplish something genuinely worth celebrating while being in a place where celebration feels strangely out of reach.

That does not make those accomplishments matter less.

They still belong to me. I still worked for them. I am still allowed to be proud of myself, even if pride feels quieter right now than I wish it did.

But I also do not want “showing up” to become the only evidence I use to decide whether I am okay. I do not want to wait until I physically cannot function before I give myself permission to admit that functioning has become difficult. And I definitely do not want to romanticize my ability to keep performing while I am struggling.

There is nothing particularly noble about seeing how long you can hurt before somebody notices.

Sometimes struggling does not look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like continuing to do everything while slowly disappearing from your own life.

I recognize myself in that sentence more than I would like to right now. But maybe recognizing it is part of how I stop disappearing.

I am still showing up. I am still studying. I am still laughing. I am still dreaming about the doctor I want to become. I am still me.

But I am also struggling.

And I am learning that I do not have to choose between those two truths just because one of them makes the other more complicated.

When Your Own Expectations Make It Heavier

There is another layer to all of this that I have been avoiding talking about.

Mostly because it is slightly embarrassing to admit how spectacularly unhelpful my own brain can be.

Apparently, struggling was not enough. I also needed to be disappointed in myself for struggling.

Very efficient.

If there is one thing I am exceptionally good at, it is expecting a lot from myself.

Sometimes that has served me well. I am ambitious. I care deeply about what I do. When something matters to me, I want to do it well.

Those qualities have gotten me through a lot of difficult things, and I do not necessarily want to lose them. But there is a point where high standards quietly become impossible ones.

And I think I have spent a lot more time on the wrong side of that line than I realized. That little voice from the last section: Good. That's what you were supposed to do. What's next? That voice has been around for a long time.

An accomplishment rarely gets to exist by itself. It immediately becomes the new expectation. You did well? Good. Now do it again. You made it through a difficult week? Great. Here comes another one. You managed everything yesterday? Then obviously you should be able to manage everything today.

There is always another benchmark. Another thing I could be doing better. Another version of myself I feel like I should already have become.

And when I am feeling like myself, I can sometimes keep up with that voice. Or at least argue with her.

Right now? She is exhausting.

Because my capacity has changed, but my expectations have not.

I am asking a version of myself who is struggling to operate exactly like the version of me who is not. And then I am confused when she cannot.

There are days when I know I need rest, but resting makes me anxious because I can immediately think of twelve other things I could be doing. There are times when I know I am mentally exhausted, but I still feel guilty closing my laptop because surely I could answer five more questions. I can recognize that I am withdrawing and then criticize myself for not answering messages. I can look around and notice little things I have fallen behind on and somehow turn each one into evidence that I am failing at something.

I should be studying more. I should be more organized. I should answer people. I should take better care of myself. I should cook. I should exercise. I should clean. I should be more present. I should be more grateful. I should be handling this better.

And my personal favorite: You know what would probably fix all of this? Being more productive.

Excellent clinical reasoning. No notes.

Except, obviously, several notes.

Because somewhere underneath all of those expectations is the assumption that if I can just force myself to function normally enough, maybe I will feel normal again.

So I push. And sometimes pushing works.

The assignment gets done. The studying happens. The exam goes well. The room gets cleaned. The box gets checked.

From the outside, it looks like the strategy was successful.

But I am beginning to understand that accomplishing the task and taking care of myself are not always the same thing.

Sometimes I can force myself through something. That does not necessarily mean forcing myself through it was what I needed. And that has been difficult for me to accept because I am much more comfortable measuring things I can see.

Grades. Questions completed. Lectures finished. Tasks crossed off a list.

Those things are concrete.

They give me something to point to at the end of the day and say: See? Today counted.

Rest is harder to measure.

So is being gentle with yourself. So is recognizing that you are reaching your limit and deciding not to test how far past it you can go.

There is no little progress bar that appears above my head when I make a healthy decision.

Tragic design flaw, honestly. I would personally appreciate the dopamine.

Instead, sometimes taking care of myself looks suspiciously like doing less. And when your self-worth has gotten tangled up with how much you can accomplish, doing less can feel dangerously close to being less.

I think that is where perfectionism becomes particularly cruel during depression.

Because high-functioning depression already makes ordinary things harder. Then perfectionism looks at the version of you who is struggling to do those things and asks why she is not doing them better.

It turns symptoms into character flaws. Exhaustion becomes laziness. Withdrawal becomes being a bad friend. Difficulty concentrating becomes a lack of discipline. A messy room becomes proof that you do not have your life together. Needing rest becomes weakness. One difficult day becomes evidence that you are losing control.

And suddenly you are not only carrying the original heaviness. You are carrying shame about how you are carrying it.

I have been doing that to myself. Probably more than I realized.

There is a version of me in my head that I keep comparing myself to.

She wakes up on time. She studies exactly when she planned to. She keeps her space clean. She eats properly. She answers everyone. She exercises. She keeps up with school. She works on the blog. She reads. She takes care of herself. She is emotionally available. She is productive without being exhausted, disciplined without needing rest, and apparently has been blessed with significantly more than twenty-four hours in a day.

Love that for her.

Unfortunately, she is fictional.

And yet I have been allowing an imaginary woman with unlimited energy to make the actual woman living my actual life feel inadequate.

That is a little ridiculous when I say it out loud.

But I think a lot of us do some version of it. We compare ourselves not only to other people, but to the best versions of ourselves we have ever been.

The semester when we were more disciplined. The month when we exercised consistently. The week when the apartment stayed clean. The version of us who answered texts quickly and cooked meals and studied efficiently and somehow had enough energy left to enjoy her evening.

And then we look at ourselves during a difficult season and ask: Why can't you just be her?

I have been asking myself that a lot lately.

Why can I not just get back into my routine? Why can I not just make myself do the things I know normally help? Why can I not be more disciplined? Why can I not feel more excited? Why can I not just snap out of this?

And maybe the question itself is part of the problem.

Because every why can't you? contains an accusation. It assumes that somewhere underneath everything, I could simply choose to be doing better and I am failing to make that choice.

I wouldn't speak that way to someone else who told me they were struggling. I know that.

If someone I loved came to me and said they were exhausted, withdrawing, having trouble enjoying things, and struggling to keep up with everyday life, my first response would not be: Have you considered being more disappointed in yourself?

I would not tell them that the solution was to earn their way back to deserving rest. I would not pull out their productivity statistics and decide whether they were struggling enough to warrant compassion.

I would care. I would probably tell them they did not need to wait until everything completely fell apart before asking for help. And yet extending that same understanding toward myself has been surprisingly difficult.

Maybe because compassion feels suspiciously like letting myself off the hook.

And perfectionism hates that.

Perfectionism tells me that pressure is the thing keeping everything together.

That if I stop demanding so much from myself, everything will unravel. That being gentler means lowering my standards. That resting means falling behind. That accepting where I am means staying here forever.

But I am starting to wonder whether the opposite might be true.

Maybe constantly fighting myself is using energy I do not have. Maybe shame is not actually an effective treatment plan.

Wild concept.

Maybe I do not need to hate the struggling version of myself into becoming the functioning version again. Maybe she needs something entirely different from me.

I do not know exactly what that looks like yet. That is the frustrating part.

I would very much enjoy a color-coded recovery plan with measurable objectives, weekly milestones, and preferably a checkbox.

Unfortunately, healing seems deeply committed to ruining my organizational system.

So right now, I am trying something much less satisfying.

I am trying to notice when should enters the conversation. I am trying to ask whether something actually needs to happen today or whether I have simply decided that a good version of me would do it. I am trying to let an accomplishment be an accomplishment before immediately moving the finish line. I am trying to remember that rest does not have to be earned through exhaustion. And I am trying, very imperfectly, to stop treating every reduction in my capacity like a reduction in my worth.

Because maybe the version of me who is struggling right now does not need another person demanding more from her. She already has enough of those voices in her head.

Maybe she needs someone on her side. And considering I am the one person she has to live with every single day, I should probably start learning how to be one of them.

I Did Not Realize How Far I Had Pulled Away

One of the harder things to admit about the past few weeks is how much I have isolated myself.

I am not particularly proud of that. And, honestly, I do not think I fully realized I was doing it until it had gotten pretty bad.

There was not a moment where I consciously decided: Okay. I'm struggling. Time to disappear from everyone who cares about me.

It happened in much smaller decisions.

I will answer later. I do not really feel like talking tonight. I do not have the energy to explain what is going on. I just need some time by myself.

None of those decisions felt particularly concerning on their own.

Sometimes you genuinely do need to be alone. But one night became another. Messages became easier to leave unanswered. Plans felt harder. Talking to people required an energy I did not feel like I had, especially when I knew someone might ask the very inconvenient question: Are you okay?

Because then I would either have to lie or explain something I did not entirely understand myself.

So I kept retreating.

And eventually I realized I had not just been taking some time for myself. I had made myself increasingly difficult to reach.

I thought I was protecting myself by becoming harder to reach. I did not realize how unreachable I was becoming.

That realization has been uncomfortable.

Because the truth is, withdrawing is not entirely new for me. There are experiences in my past that taught me to associate vulnerability with risk.

When you have learned that letting someone see you struggling can come with consequences, when being vulnerable has left you hurt, disappointed, misunderstood, or feeling like your emotions were something you needed to manage for other people, you get very good at handling things yourself.

At least, you think you do.

You learn how to become smaller when things hurt. You stop asking for things. You tell yourself you do not need anyone. You retreat before someone else gets the opportunity to leave.

And for a long time, I think some part of me considered that independence.

I am beginning to realize that sometimes it was protection. Protection that probably made sense when I learned it. But coping mechanisms do not always realize when the circumstances have changed.

The people in my life now are not necessarily the people or situations that taught me I needed to protect myself that way. And yet when I started struggling, my brain reached for something familiar: Go inward. Handle it yourself. Don't become anyone else's problem.

The trouble is that isolation has a way of feeding itself.

You do not answer because you are exhausted. Then you feel guilty for not answering. Then enough time passes that answering feels awkward. Now you need to explain why you have disappeared, which requires even more energy. So you avoid it a little longer. And suddenly something that started as I just need tonight to myself has become loneliness.

I do not say any of this to excuse the way I have pulled away. People I care about deserve communication from me.

Understanding why I did something does not mean pretending it did not affect anyone else. But I also do not think shaming myself for it is going to help me change it.

I can take responsibility for withdrawing without deciding that withdrawing makes me a bad friend, a bad partner, or a bad person. I can recognize that this was a protective response without pretending it is still protecting me.

And maybe that is one of the harder parts of getting better at knowing yourself.

Sometimes you have to thank an old survival mechanism for what it once did for you...and admit that you do not want to live there anymore.

Right now, I am trying to reach back out. Not perfectly. Not all at once.

Sometimes it is answering one message. Sometimes it is letting someone know that I have been having a hard time instead of inventing another reason for why I have been quiet. Sometimes it is allowing someone to care about me without immediately feeling like I need to make myself easier to care about.

That last one is harder than I would like to admit.

But I do not think connection requires me to show up as the easiest, happiest, most put-together version of myself. And I do not want the people I love to only know how to find me when I am doing well.

I am still learning how to let people reach me when I am not.

I Do Not Feel Like Myself Right Now

I think the simplest way I can describe how I have been feeling lately is this: I miss myself.

Which is a strange thing to say when I am obviously still here.

I still recognize myself. I still know what I love. I still know what I want. I still laugh too loudly when something catches me off guard. I can still disappear into a book for hours. I can still talk about forensic pathology for significantly longer than anyone asked me to.

The pieces are here. They just feel quieter. And I think that has been one of the hardest parts of this.

There are things about myself that I have always taken for granted.

My excitement. My curiosity. The way I can become completely obsessed with something I love. The little things I look forward to. The desire to talk to people I care about. The ability to feel genuinely excited about something I worked hard for.

Usually, those things happen without me having to think about them.

Right now, I notice their absence. Or maybe not even their absence. Their distance.

Because every once in a while, something breaks through. I laugh really hard. A book completely consumes me. Someone I love makes me feel safe enough to stop thinking for a while. Something about my future makes me excited again.

And there I am. Oh. Hi. I missed you.

Then sometimes the heaviness settles back in, and I find myself wondering when that version of me is going to stay.

I think there is a particular kind of grief in missing a version of yourself that you know still exists.

Because I remember what it feels like to move through my life with more energy than this. I remember enjoying things without having to consciously notice that I am enjoying them. I remember accomplishing something and actually letting myself feel proud of it. I remember wanting connection instead of instinctively retreating from it.

And when you remember that version of yourself so clearly, it can be tempting to turn recovery into another demand.

Get her back. Fix this. Do whatever you need to do so you can be her again.

There goes that perfectionism, clocking in for another completely unnecessary shift.

But maybe I do not need to chase myself quite so aggressively. Maybe the goal is not to force myself back into an older version of me as quickly as possible. Maybe right now, I just need to make it easier for myself to come back.

That means I am trying to pay attention to the moments when I do feel something. Not interrogate them. Not ask how long they are going to last. Just notice them.

I am trying to remember that a good moment does not mean I made the difficult ones up. And a difficult moment does not erase the good one that happened an hour before. Both belong here.

So does the version of me writing this.

She is quieter. She is tired. She is figuring some things out. She is not showing up exactly the way she wishes she could. But she is still deserving of the same patience I keep reserving for some hypothetical future version of myself who has everything figured out.

And maybe most importantly, “I don't feel like myself” is not the same sentence as “I am no longer myself.”

I need to remember that.

The things I love are still mine. The people I love are still mine. The ridiculous collection of fictional men I have emotionally adopted is, regrettably, still very much mine. My pink is still mine. My dreams are still mine. The future forensic pathologist is still in here too.

None of those things disappeared because I am having a hard time accessing them right now. And I do not know exactly when I will feel completely like myself again.

That is probably the part of this I would most like to skip. I would love to flip ahead a few chapters and make sure everything turns out okay.

Unfortunately, life continues to refuse to provide me with spoilers.

Extremely inconsiderate.

So I am trying not to make promises about when this will pass. I can only be honest about where I am.

And where I am right now is somewhere between missing myself and beginning to understand that missing her means she is still someone I know how to recognize.

Maybe that is enough for today.

I am Not Writing This From the Other Side

Usually, when we tell stories about difficult periods in our lives, we tell them afterward.

Once we understand them. Once we know what helped. Once enough time has passed that we can look backward and say, "This is what happened to me, and this is what I learned."

There is something comforting about a story with an ending.

This is not one of those stories. I am not writing this from the other side. I am writing it from somewhere in the middle. I am still struggling. I am still having days when I feel more like myself and days when everything feels heavier again. I am still trying to reconnect with people I have pulled away from. I am still learning how to rest without immediately turning rest into something I need to feel guilty about. I am still catching myself measuring my worth by how productive I managed to be that day. And I am still figuring out what taking care of myself actually needs to look like right now.

I wish I could tell you that recognizing what was happening immediately made everything easier. It didn't.

Awareness is important, but unfortunately it is not magic.

Very inconvenient.

There wasn't a moment when I finally admitted, "Okay, I'm not doing well", and suddenly knew exactly how to fix it. But admitting it did change something.

It meant I could stop spending so much energy trying to convince myself that nothing was wrong. It meant I could start being more honest. With myself. With people who care about me. And now, apparently, with all of you.

That honesty feels scary.

There is a part of me that would much rather wait until I could write this from a safer distance. I would like to show you the polished version. The one where I can point to the exact moment things started getting better and tell you precisely what I did to get there.

But I keep thinking about the person who might be reading this while they are still in their middle too. The person who does not have the success story yet. The person who knows something is not right but keeps wondering whether it is bad enough to acknowledge. The person who is still showing up, still accomplishing things, still laughing sometimes, and therefore keeps talking themselves out of the fact that they are struggling.

Maybe that person does not need another story told entirely from the finish line. Maybe they just need someone sitting somewhere along the road saying: Yeah. I'm here too.

So that is what this is.

I do not have a recovery story for you yet. I have a right-now story.

And right now, I am trying. Not in the way I usually define trying. Not by pushing harder or squeezing more productivity out of myself or proving that I can handle everything without letting it affect me. I am trying to be honest when I am not okay. I am trying to let people reach me. I am trying to notice when I am disappearing into myself. I am trying to accept that taking care of my mental health is not something I should wait to do until everything else on my to-do list is finished.

Because that list will never be finished. Medical school will keep moving. There will be another exam. Another deadline. Another thing that feels urgent.

And I do not want to keep treating myself like the least urgent thing in my own life.

I do not know what the next few weeks will look like. I do not know when I will wake up and realize that things feel lighter. I do not know whether getting better will happen gradually enough that I barely notice it or whether one day I will suddenly recognize more of myself again.

I would love to know.

But maybe I do not need to know yet. Maybe right now, knowing that something needs my attention is enough. And maybe talking about it before I have a perfect ending is part of choosing not to disappear quietly.

So no, this is not the part where I tell you I figured everything out. I have not. I am still here. Still figuring it out. Still reaching back toward the people I love. Still trying to reach back toward myself.

And for right now, I think being here is enough.

If You Are Here Too

If you have made it this far and recognized a little too much of yourself somewhere in these words, I wish I had a perfect set of instructions to give you.

I do not. I am still figuring this out too.

But I do know that you do not have to wait until you completely fall apart before you are allowed to acknowledge that something is wrong. You do not have to stop functioning first. You do not have to fail the exam. You do not have to stop laughing. You do not have to lose every piece of yourself before deciding that the pieces that feel harder to reach matter. And you certainly do not need to prove that you are struggling enough to deserve support.

Maybe you have been telling yourself you are just tired. Maybe you have been withdrawing without realizing how far you have gone. Maybe you are accomplishing everything expected of you and wondering why none of it feels particularly good. Or maybe you just have not felt like yourself lately, and you do not really know why.

Please tell someone. A partner. A friend. A family member. Someone you trust. A therapist or another mental health professional.

You do not have to explain it perfectly. You do not even have to understand it perfectly yet. Sometimes “I haven't been doing very well lately” is enough to open the door.

I think one of the things I am learning right now is that asking someone to sit beside you while you are struggling is not the same thing as asking them to fix you. You are allowed to be cared for before you have figured out exactly what you need.

And if reaching out feels difficult because you have spent a long time convincing yourself that handling things alone is safer, I understand that more than I wish I did. I am working on it too.

Maybe that is really all I wanted this post to be. Not a guide. Not a recovery story. Not a perfectly packaged lesson about resilience.

Just someone sitting beside you for a few minutes saying: Yeah. Me too.

I do not know exactly when I am going to feel completely like myself again.

But the pink scrubs are still here. The forensic pathology dream is still here. The books stacked around my apartment are definitely still here. The people I love are still here, even when I have made myself harder to reach.

And so am I.

Maybe right now, that is enough.

Thank you, as always, for spending a little piece of your week here with me, and especially for sitting with me through one of the more vulnerable conversations we have had.

I don't take that lightly.

Take care of yourself this week.

Not just the version of you who gets everything done. Not just the version who shows up for everyone else. Not just the version who looks fine from the outside.

You.

The one underneath all of that.

And if you have not felt quite like yourself lately, I hope you give yourself permission to say it out loud. I hope you let somebody reach you. I hope you remember that having a difficult season does not erase everything you were before it, and it does not get to decide everything you will be after it.

As for me, I am going to keep figuring this out.

Probably imperfectly.

Definitely with an unreasonable number of books nearby. And because apparently medical school remains completely uninterested in accommodating my personal character development, with a few pathology lectures waiting for me too.

Rude.

But I am here.

And right now, I am learning that showing up for myself matters just as much as showing up for everything else.

One day, one conversation, one ridiculously small act of self-compassion at a time.

Until next week, babes.

XOXO,

Kenzie

The Forensic Fashionista

"I am the rock against which the surf crashes." - Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames