Stridi

Photo by Juan Pablo Arenas I thought I would to write about how I dealt with my anxiety whilst at Uni, but the truth is that I did not.  In fact, in my four years of University, I spent the first year refusing to acknowledge it as a possibility, and the second and third in denial, and the fourth bouncing back and forth between treatment, denial and frequent panic attacks.    I thought that anxiety was not a thing I was “allowed” to have, that it was seen as either something to be prayed away, or an illness for rich people with nothing else to do and time on their hands. If I went back home saying I have “anxiety”, my family would have assumed it was something I “picked up” like a person picks up a quirky affection to make themselves seem more interesting and complex. And to a certain extent, I believed this too. I thought I was too privileged to have anxiety, too fortunate to be depressed and too African for the two together. So I never dealt