It doesn't go away

"Well, you can never get rid of your anxiety; but the trick is learning skills to cope with it," Dr. Ono told me. My heart sank.

This was August 2012, a month and a half after I had been diagnosed with OCD and depression, and four months after my last serious suicide incident. Since pursuing treatment, I had acquired a new hope that I would be able to be free of my crippling anxiety. But Dr. Ono's statement was hard for me to hear. I heard that I would have to keep fighting off my crushing thoughts for the rest of my life, and I was not prepared for that.

Since then, I've experienced what learning to cope with it looks like. But what I did not expect was how long it takes to process certain experiences.

To this day, almost four years after the fact, I am still processing the events that happened when I was pledging. I am still processing what happened my first active semester. Triggering memories resurface at random times, and every time, I have to convince myself that these memories really happened to me. This is no different from weeks or months after the actual events; the events seemed surreal then too. I still have not claimed these memories as part of my history. On the one hand, that is good, because that means that these incredulously negative events do not define me. But on the other hand, not owning these memories cuts out a chunk of my existence and denies what has shaped me into who I am. When I think of positive experiences that happened around the same time, it becomes a challenge to contextualize them and to remember that they coexisted with the negative experiences.

Maybe Dr. Ono's statement "You can never get rid of your anxiety" also means that you cannot escape the negative feelings that come with memories tied to anxiety. Maybe certain experiences are so traumatic that they can never be fully processed and internalized.