Abigail's Anxieties

Dear world,  please believe me when I tell you I'm ill. I know, I know. Looking at me from the outside I look like a relatively healthy 20-year-old woman. I don't look particularly overweight, I'm taller than the average woman but nothing too notable.  But what I need you to understand, world, is that what you see is a one-second snapshot of my life.  What you don't see is the confusion, the anxiety, the lack of motivation, the lack of emotion and the stress in my brain.  You don't see the night before where I was lying in bed wondering if it was worth getting up the next day just to go back to bed, to get up again, to go to bed again...  You don't see just how many thoughts are going through my head at any one time.  You don't see me crying, holding myself and sometimes unable to make a single noise as I try to understand what is going on around me while whatever is around me is making no effort to try and understand...

Coping with exams when you have mental health problems. So I've just completed my first year at university, YAY!!! (insert applause here) and as part of finishing my first year I had to do one of my worst nightmares: sit an exam, dun dun dunnnn!!! Now I have never, ever, EVER liked exams and I want to say to those who do enjoy exams, please teach me your ways. Anyway, while others who don't like exams may just feel a little nervous and unprepared when going in, when you have mental health problems the situation can be very different. In my own personal experience, I can have studied as much as humanly possible, practised as many questions I could get my hands on and watched as many educational youtube videos that I could stay awake for but in the end, my anxiety will provide that nasty little voice in my head telling me that I know nothing and that I've already failed the exam so what is the point of even sitting it. Then my depression decides to join the p...