MATILDA

Let’s see if I still remember how to do this. It’s been a hot, hot minute. I feel like I’ve kinda wasted away a year and a half of my life, sorta. When the genocide in Gaza became amplified and publicized in November of 2023, I got involved in the advocacy for it, because I know some Gazans who went to and still go to VIU. I saw my therapist and the school’s nurse practitioner and I got put on antidepressants, specifically escitalopram. Art, my therapist, wasn’t quite wholly in support of it, and his reasoning was that without the antidepressant, I took on too much for my plate of responsibilities, the drug would add a layer of bubble wrap, and I would simply add even more responsibilities for myself. However, he recognised that I was in charge of my own body and mental health, so with the nurse practitioner, I decided to start on a course of antidepressants. I think the escitalopram works somewhat for what it’s intended, I’ve been through breakups and pitfalls and setbacks and of course they all make me sad occasionally, but more and more, I’ve had the mindset of “it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” except somehow nothing seems to matter to me in any scheme of things now. I’m not doing my assignments and am failing? Doesn’t matter nor reflect on me as a person. I’m missing deadlines for work interviews? Doesn’t matter nor reflect on me as a person. Nothing seems to be a reflection of me as a person. I don’t know if it’s also coupled with the senioritis and the fact that, for as long as I’ve been in Canada, I’ve been a student, and once I graduate, I’ll be a big girl living the big girl life with big girl responsibilities and I’m not sure I’m equipped for it, nor do I look forward to it completely. To say that the past year was an entire waste would also be reductionist too, because even though school went by in a dumpster fiery blur, in terms of my Chairperson term on the VIUSU, we managed to make some big moves, and we finally collectively removed the previous President of VIU, under whose leadership our school kept bleeding more and more money. That was a much needed breakthrough, and the students definitely took the lead on that one. This summer, I will be spending months in Senegal doing climate mitigation research and interviewing climate refugees who have already been impacted by coastal erosion and whose livelihoods have been crushed and completed transformed. In that way, I suppose the last year really isn’t as bad as I think it is, but again, I don’t know if it’s the escitalopram, I really don’t have a grasp of reality that has gone by. I know I’m so overwhelmed by change and the stress of juggling school, work, as well as the minutiae of the changing nature of international student and work/immigration visas. I want to take my antidepressant through to when I graduate and maybe in the first year of settling into a big girl job, but heck. I am looking forward to being my full complete person and feeling the things I’m used to feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely not hating on the antidepressant and I recognise that I need it for a time, but I miss the person I used to be. I almost don’t recognise myself.