I don’t know what to write.

Annika Fisher-Eddy (she/they)

Editorial Team Member

Trigger warning: Mentions suicide

For the first time since I started working for the magazine, I have no idea what to write. 

Usually I have lots to say, but honestly I feel like like so much s**t has gone on in my life that I don’t know where to start.

For starters, my brother took his own life a month and a half ago, at the age of 40. It’s hard to explain my grief, because honestly I don’t know if my mental health issues have been caused by that or the other things in my life. Going to his funeral was hard for me, but I got over that pretty quickly. Now I feel like I don’t really feel the grief anymore, but maybe subconsciously I do. The biggest concern it triggered is just thinking about whether I’m only going to live to be 40 years old, too. If adulthood was that hard for him, is it going to be the same for me? I can’t help but wonder. That happening showed me that there are a lot of things in life that are out of our control. I really don’t like not being in control of what goes on in my life, and my brother committing suicide didn’t help that. It also made me slightly consider doing it to myself. I feel so unprepared for adulthood that it would be a way to avoid it. But I’m not going to do it, because I’m too scared. Death is also one of my biggest fears.

Secondly, I’m in my final semester of high school right now, which has been really hard for me, and I might just have the worst case of senioritis out of everyone in the senior class. I don’t feel like I’m ready to be an adult. I started taking a How To Be An Adult class this semester, and I ended up dropping out of the class because it was too stressful for me and the teacher wasn’t very supportive about it. I’m doing okay in the rest of my classes, but honestly I don’t really want to do anything anymore and I kinda just want to time travel to graduation. I’m so done with school.

The fact that I got into my first fender bender on Thursday definitely doesn’t help me feel like I’m ready to be on my own. I don’t have my driver’s license yet, I only have my learner’s permit. I was the one driving and I was changing lanes but forgot to look in my blind spot, and I side-swiped a lady. No one was injured, but she ended up calling our insurance despite agreeing to our offer to pay for the damage out of pocket, and she also hired a personal injury lawyer even though she wasn’t injured. I guess it’s giving me experience for being an adult. I’m going to pay for the damages, and I will have to interact with difficult people sometimes.

There have also been rumors going around about me at school. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me too much. I mostly find it funny. But it’s still annoying when you do something minor and it gets exaggerated and eventually almost the entire school knows about it. Because I don’t think anyone is going to want to go to prom with me now. I have a bad reputation at school now, and it kinda seems like everyone hates me. But it is what it is, and I only have to deal with it for four more months, and then I can have a fresh start in college.

I’m so scared of what comes next. Once I graduate high school, I’m going to be completely on my own for the first time. It will be my first time not living with my parents, having to make my own money, and having to make decisions all by myself without my parents guiding me. It’s terrifying. Uncertainty has always been my greatest fear, and not knowing what it will be like to be an adult gives me massive anxiety, and knowing that I’m at the peak of the end of my childhood is not a good feeling. It might even be the stem of a lot of my current mental health issues.

All of this has caused my OCD to flare up. It’s gotten progressively worse the more and more things that go wrong in my life, and I’m doing the treatment for it but it’s hard and stressful. It’s gotten to the point where it’s affected every aspect of my life. Stress is a major trigger for it, so something stressful happens in my life which heightens my OCD, but then the OCD stresses me out which makes it even worse. I just don’t know what to do at this point.

On the bright side, I got into Texas State University and University of North Texas! My two top choices for school. But I still have to take a math exam in order to graduate because I didn’t do well enough on the math portion of the SAT. I’ve kinda been procrastinating on taking the exam. But once that’s outta the way, I should be fine to graduate. I already have all the credits I need.

I guess at this point I just feel like my life is falling apart. It feels like there aren’t any positives in my life, and I also don’t know if I’m ready for the future that I’m about to start. But I just have to push through until graduation, and then I think my life will change for the better.