HI, I’M A FREEZER
“If I tell you a secret, do you promise to tell everyone?” – Thin, Grace Bowman
Let me explain. This isn’t something I’ve shared with anyone before because there was no reason to, and people judge. Complaining about suffering from anxiety attacks at one of the world’s best unis would be the worst kind of first world problem, and not really the kind of thing you want to put a hashtag next to.
Freezing. Fear. Prevarication. Denial. Avoidance. Call it what you want, but at high school it was powerful enough for me never to so much as sketch out a revision timetable and wake up at 4am to finish coursework on the day it was due. Because if everything was done at the last minute, no one could judge you if it was bad, right? After all, you always knew you could do better next time. It’s Oxford, no one does that there; it’s fine, it’ll sort itself out.
Until, of course, it didn’t.
Last term, the twin pressures of being a choral scholar and dual linguist gave me the perfect excuse to intensify my old habits. Even better, unlike high school, there were no parents or teachers to monitor me. I cringe thinking about how I would blithely lie to my family in my calls home. “Everything’s amazing! Work is great!” As if. I was leaving my work to the last minute and forgetting meetings and not reading because I was afraid of spending time on improving myself or, God forbid, dragging anyone else into my failure. Estudiante al borde de un ataque de nervios and then some.
My entire Michaelmas vac was spent coming to the obvious conclusion that this could not go on.
After much – you guessed it, prevarication – on the evening before I was due back, I decided to contact my Academic Affairs Rep and Senior Tutor via Facebook chat and email respectively, cursing myself all the way. Far from the angry diatribes I was expecting, I was praised for admitting that I had a problem and organised meetings with both of them the very next day. In these meetings, I was introduced to my saviour, Google Calendar. Knowing my where my obligations are helps me to plan ahead and save space for the fun stuff, and the JCR emails that arrive my inbox now offer opportunities, not mocking reminders of what I could be doing if only I organised my life. Sharing is not weakness, and being part of a college community means that help is only a quad away.
Most importantly, I’ve decided to cut myself some slack. Sometimes that means forgiving myself for occasionally being up past 1am slaying the word count of an article due in the morning. After all, the fact that I’m not up playing Candy Crush while beating myself up over the events of the day is nothing short of miraculous.
I refuse to suffer in silence. My name is Georgiana Jackson-Callen, I am a Mertonian and I am a recovering freezer. Watch me defrost at www.atragicmulatto.wordpress.com.
