College is stressful

Amid all the news this week about VT, I heard that one in 10 college students think of suicide and one in 100 actually attempt it. Do you find those statistics alarming? Personally, I'm surprised they aren't higher.

I graduated from college over a decade ago. I've had reason recently to go back to my journals and read entries from that time. They are highly personal and offline, and there is something very tactile about actually having a book and seeing my own handwriting and what color ink I used and how I arranged things on the page itself which I don't get from all my online blogging...

I didn't realize it at the time, but in college, I was extremely depressed. Then again, maybe I did, as nearly every entry includes the phrase "I am depressed."

I didn't do anything about it in terms of seeking help until years later. I didn't have it as bad as some as I was smart and I had a partial scholarship, but I still felt a great deal of pressure and unhappiness. I was under a lot of stress to succeed academically and financially and from some candid conversations with friends my age, I know now I was not alone. Back then, though, it certainally felt like it. My basic hope was that the experience was a necessary means to an end; that after graduation I would no longer have the academic stress and the financial burdens wouldn't be so great once I started a job where I was compensated well. That didn't really work out the way I had planned, which is one of the reasons I fell back on acting. At least my story is happy presently as a result.

However, when I read my own writings from when I was an undergrad, I can see it would not have taken much for me to snap. I doubt I would have gone down in a dramatic blaze of glory harming others physically. But I did contemplate ending it all several times in those years and it would have hurt a lot of people emotionally if I had made an attempt and/or succeeded.