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an open space for youth writing & mental health discussion
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 About 75% of all mental health issues begin in the years of adolescence. It can feel like stepping on eggshells when trying to encourage anyone who may be struggling with mental health, but it is incredibly important to be there for them. Teenagers and their moods can be scary, so it’s understandable to worry you might be doing the wrong thing when trying to help someone with mental illness, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Doing research on the proper ways to provide support to those struggling with their mental health is not only exceedingly important, but also a massive display of how much you care.
 When I was younger, I used to play dress-up. I would throw on my slightly outgrown Cinderella princess costume—a hand-me down from cousins—over my pajamas first thing in the morning, completed with a moth-white headband that would gently pinch my ears at the sides. And I clomped around the house with my low heels letting everyone know tacitly when I made an entrance. In retrospect, I distanced myself from traditional attire because I wanted to wear what I felt comfortable in—something that gave me a sheltered and secure feeling.
 My parents immigrated to the United States back in the 2000s. They originally grew up in the large city of Guangzhou. Every other summer, I would go visit for a couple months. My mother’s side lived in the rural areas, with breakfast carts on sidewalks and college students rushing to the local university my grandparents used to teach at. My father’s side, however, lived in the city and resided in one of the tallest buildings in Guangzhou. I would always love switching back and forth because the differences were so marvelous to me.
My dad moved here to the U.S. to attend University of Cincinnati and then Stanford University, and my mom followed. I spent my first birthday at Stanford with all my dad’s graduate classmates, and I watched him get his masters’ degree there. My mother, a very outspoken and passionate woman, stayed committal. She took care of me the entire time my dad was working on getting his education, and we soon moved to a city in Arizona after he got his degree.  I used to wonder--I always have, about how people lose again and again and still don't stop trying. On my own path, I'd never attempt the struggle again. I was used to being held back by dejection and thus, eventually became a weakling.
"What if I fail again;" "What if my efforts become useless in the end;" "What if someone else gets the chance and I don't." These were the thoughts that fed on my courage and birthed cowardice. The mere idea of losing wouldn't let me try and that is what made me a loser. Upon opening my eyes and shedding the darkness away I witnessed myself getting lost in the azure.  [Note: everyone's experience with mental health & anxiety is different; the concept of reverse psychology is not a strategy that will work for everyone nor are we necessarily advocating for it. This is simply one story of a person's journey with anxiety.]
Every person may feel anxious or worried at some point in their life. But in my case, I was exceptionally susceptible to it, and it had been making my life relatively difficult and agonizing. Anything slightly worrisome or exciting would cause my anxiety to peak, in turn causing my physical and cognitive abilities to sharply decline—which would make me unable to properly deal with any issues present in that situation.  As the theater lights fade, the audience quiets and cast members begin walking across the stage. They hurry in random directions, sporadically entering and exiting the stage. The music grows louder, and projections of social media apps flash across the set. But the silence, which comes suddenly, shocks the audience even more. Evan Hansen snaps open his laptop, and its screen illuminates his face so the audience can see his hesitation as he leans forward to type. “Dear Evan Hansen: today is going to be an amazing day and here’s why. Because all you have to do is just be yourself,” he writes. There’s a pause, and the theater sits still for a moment. Resuming abruptly, Evan says, “But also confident. That’s important. And interesting. Easy to talk to. Approachable. But mostly yourself. That’s the big, the number one.”
 It's taken twenty springs and autumns, and I've only now come to accept it. I am an absent-minded pessimist who lets sadness seep in every now and then, but actively tries not to bring it up in conversation. The walk we took after our evening class, I don't recall the name of your new basketball team or what I said when you told me your dog was sick. I remember the crackle of leaves underneath our boots, the out-of-ordinary red of your nose, and the shock of your frost-bitten fingertips touching my forehead to release the stress creases. I won't remember the road we need to take but I remember the sequence of songs we need to play along a car ride. I can lie still beneath the open sky and engage in hour long games of pareidolia - a candy floss machine that poofs up a high necked poodle or a distorted pineapple formed of panicky clouds. Nothing cancels pessimism like escapism.
 Hi everyone. My name is Lina Chokrane.
That’s CHOKE like the verb, RAIN like the noun. I get it: to someone who doesn’t speak Arabic, you may not recognize the proper pronunciation. I’ve gotten “cockrane,” “shockran," and once someone just gave up. A substitute was going through attendance, reading out names like “David Smith” and “Isabelle Sanderson” and when they got to mine, they just said “Lina” — their head tilted to the right because it was better to say nothing, then to just say the wrong thing.  A. Apples- There’s a fresh bag of apples in the fridge. She only grabs one to enjoy the sour and tarty flavor of the green fruit. When she finishes one, the overwhelming feeling of needing more consumes her as she goes back for another. One apple after another; she can’t help herself. Soon she goes back only to stick her hand in an empty bag. Now she is left feeling sick to her stomach and everyone mad at her for eating all the apples.
B. Bottomless Pit- They call her stomach a bottomless pit from her nonstop eating and never getting full. It’s as if her stomach holds no food as she chows down, not even stopping to breathe. When everyone is out for the count and can eat no more, she still lingers around for something else. Her stomach is a bottomless pit; she needs more.  A few years ago, I saw a Ted Talk by John Green. I didn't know much about him at the time, but his message of how learning is the meaning of life resonated with me. He talked about how YouTube is a good platform for learning things, if you know where to look. This brought out the excitement for learning new things that I had felt as a child when I watched movies and TV and absorbed things from them.
 It’s unfortunate that blessings and curses are often indistinguishable at face value. We find ourselves chasing ideas or hopes that only seek to make our lives harder and often ignore that which could easily make us happy. That’s really what it means to be a human, I guess. We’re idealists living in an imperfect world and while we strive for perfection, while we pine after symmetry, the universe continues to overpower us with confusion and meaninglessness. We constantly look for the black and white in the world. Our binary perceptions are so deeply ingrained into the societies we have built. Good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, X and Y. We attempt to weave the fabric of reality with only 2 strings of opposing colors.
 Anxiety. What does it mean? What even is it?
The definition of it is “an overcoming feeling of worry or nervousness." In some circumstances I can relate to that; it is worry. It is nervousness. However, it is so much more that that feeling.  For the longest time, fifteen years to be exact, I dreamed of growing up to be a ballerina. I took my first ballet class at the age of three after begging my parents to sign me up. My initial years of ballet were exactly as I had imagined before starting; I wore a pink leotard with pink tights and pink ballet slippers, as I leapt around freely and marveled in the magic of the yearly production of The Nutcracker.
 I have always considered waves to be one of the most beautiful aspects of nature to exist.
Their constant motion and ability to start over again and again in spite of whoever looks on exemplifies resilience to me, and I have loved this idea because it was a needed reminder that people always have the ability to move forward, as long as they let themselves do so. |
