Why I'm glad I left grad school 5 years ago for my mental health

I hope this story is a reminder that life is not a series of befores and afters, but rather moments of radical uncertainty, courage, and hope in spite of no horizon in sight.

Hi darling soul, in this newsletter I am going to offer you some songs to “play along” as you read.

This is something I did in my memoir; I embedded songs in the chapters—music I listened to while writing the words on the page, or songs that represented the story being told. Music is often how I find flow or recall stories that are old and locked away. This is one of those stories, so I’m including the songs here as we go.

If you’d like to listen along, you’ll see a song pop up in the text when it’s time. Simply play the song and keep reading with the music in the background.

If that’s overstimulating, don’t worry, the story will be the same :)

Welcome to Week 9, Season Three of The Messy Middle.

On Friday I will be finishing something I started seven years ago, but couldn’t finish because of my mental health.

It feels a little surreal to have this day approach, because it’s laced with a history I’ve tried so hard to forget, but can’t.

Because without the nights I stood in front of the mirror chastising my existence, without the end of my marriage and relapse in my eating disorder, without the wine and pills and swollen eyes home alone, I would not be here. I would not be typing this right now. I would not be sharing this with you so that we both can know it gets better. So we both can know in spite of how static and unchanging our lives may feel, they are always in motion.

This post is normally for paid subscribers, but in honor of Suicide Awareness Month I am opening it up to all readers for September. Paid subscriptions are only $5/month, so if you’d like to show your support you can still become a paid subscriber.

Last week I wrote about feeling dead inside, and I can confirm that as of this moment, writing this newsletter on the brink of tears, I am not.

I am so, so very not. And more than anything, I am reminded that nothing inside me is or ever was dead—only afraid of being seen in its crooked and naked state.

The story I’m about to tell comes in an accidentally timely way—although maybe it’s a reminder that nothing is accidental. September is Suicide Awareness Month, and though I’ve struggled with suicidal depression for most of my life, I haven’t written about or said anything on any of my online platforms this month.

There’s no intention behind that—I honestly think it’s because I’m stable and haven’t been suicidal in almost nine months. And in my stability, I forget how far I’ve come. In my stability, I forget how so many other people are still barely holding on. In my stability, I’m reminded not to forget, because you and I both deserve to remember how much our lives matter.

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Seven years ago I moved to Spokane, WA with my then-boyfriend-now-ex-husband to start a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

From 2005-2016 I struggled silently with an eating disorder and suicidal depression. Though I went to therapy (you can read more about my eating disorder here), I often felt misunderstood by my therapists, which reinforced the belief that I was an unsolvable puzzle.

In my mid-twenties I started working as a middle school teacher, and I think the combination of my age and willingness to listen made my office a safe space for kiddos to fall apart. I became a liaison for these kids—a halfway point between their own shame about asking for help and the door to the school counselor. So many of my students were entrenched in pressure to excel and social anxiety, and a handful of them would say things to me like, “I don’t think anyone would care if I was here or not.”

Josh (my now ex-husband) sat me down one night and told me he was worried about my eating disorder.

The pressure I’d started placing on myself to show up for my students, for him, my recently divorced parents, and my friends left my wellbeing on the back-burner. It was the first time someone had said, “I can see you’re struggling and I want you to get help,” and the feeling of being seen and validated in my experience was enough to get me to an intake session.

A month later I was admitted into outpatient treatment. I spent four months learning life-changing skills to regulate my emotions, communicate my needs, accept dialectics (y’all know how I am a fan of “both/and”), and see my worth as separate from my appearance.

I left treatment invigorated and inspired to pay it forward and get my master’s degree in mental health counseling. I would dedicate myself to helping youth who struggled with an existence of such self-hatred, that disappearing felt like the only option.

For the first year of school, I excelled.

I dove head first into the materials, mastering every topic and critically unpacking every chapter, every research paper, every presentation. The people I wanted to serve one day deserved a therapist who knew what the fuck they were doing and gave a shit. I wasn’t going to do anything less than my best, because it’s what I wished I’d had for so many years from therapists who couldn’t help me.

As my first year went on I started to notice flaws in some of the things I was learning. Why was so much research centered around men? White people? Cis, heterosexual individuals? How can the therapy we provide really be “evidence-based” if the evidence isn’t representative of everyone that goes to therapy?

When I entered into my internship in the Spring of 2017, I had more questions. I was a therapist in a community mental health organization for people whose primary diagnoses was borderline personality disorder (BPD) and often comorbid with PTSD, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. Most of my clients were suicidal, hopeless, and convinced the world wanted them to disappear. Most of my coworkers were burned out, disillusioned, and apathetic.

Read more about my experience in treatment and grad school in my memoir, “Where the River Flows” here

I desperately wanted to make everything better.

I wanted to help my clients see that there was hope for them and that their past did not have to define their future. That together we would walk through the darkness until it got just a little bit lighter.

I wanted to remind my coworkers of their “why.” I wanted to re-invigorate their spirits and help them remember why they started this work in the first place—I wanted them to care enough to start sitting in the dark again, too.

Over the next several months I started to understand my client’s hopelessness and my coworkers’ disillusionment.

My clients faced life circumstances that seemed impossible to overcome or change, and as clinicians our hands were constantly tied by insurance or program policy to help them. I spent as much time doing case management and helping clients navigate transportation and housing as I did helping them cope with panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.

Their physical environments impacted their emotional worlds, which challenged their ability to navigate their physical environments, and the cycles they were trapped in seemed to them, and me, helpless and hopeless.

Still, I wanted to change everything, and thought I could. I showed up to team meetings with hope and optimism. Ideas of how we could help our clients and improve our resilience to do so. I made presentations on new forms of therapy that might help our clients who struggled with eating disorders. I led groups to try and bring fresh energy into the facility. I challenged my team to change how we talked about clients when they weren’t present, because our clients were people, and we had to think of them that way if we wanted them to think of themselves that way.

I spent the spring and summer at my internship unraveling.

At the same time, I was planning my wedding. Josh had proposed just after we moved to Spokane, and we decided to get married in the summer between my first and second year of school.

The pressure I had placed on myself to do it all was taking a toll, and I was unaware of the cost. By June of 2017, I had significantly relapsed in my eating disorder, though I wasn’t willing to admit it. Two months later, we got married.

When school started again in fall, I was barely holding it all together. I was hungry, tired, and losing steam to inspire everyone around me, let alone myself. I started having panic attacks at my internship and running out of classes to see the school counselor. I couldn’t control what felt like a flood of fear drowning me from inside. Like water was trapped in my throat and I couldn’t swallow it fast enough to stop it from coming up.

I started binge-eating and drinking. Urges to hit myself emerged after years of those thoughts being absent.

One night when Josh’s mom was visiting I had to excuse myself from the dinner table to slap myself in the bathroom. My body felt not my own, and an inexplicable logic told me the only way to make my body real was to hurt it. That the only way to stop myself from hurting myself was to hurt myself more. A perpetual cycle of punishment where the body I lived in was suddenly the body that abused me, and I had to fight back.

How do you get out of a fight with yourself? How do you pull self off the self? And which self do you stop?

The confusion that erupts in these episodes is cloaked in shame, and I was once again in an all encompassing darkness.

A few weeks before winter quarter began, I sat in my professor’s office and told her I needed to take some time off of school.

We decided I would take two weeks off, and that when I returned I’d be placed in a different internship with lower risk clients.

When I returned, the shame of having to take a break and change internships leaked into every move I made. Nothing was good enough, because I wasn’t good enough. I'd already failed, and I’d forever be the girl who couldn’t finish her internship and had to step down.

Shame took new forms and started to tell me how selfish I was. That it was ridiculous to be concerned about how my peers or professors would view me when the people who were really struggling were the ones I was too weak to help. That their lives were far more difficult than mine, and I should have had the strength and ability to stay with them. That I was a coward, and that thinking about my own cowardice made me a worthless human being. Shame stacks shame on shame, and she has no interest in stopping.

I wanted, for the first time in a decade, to die.

In December, I decided alongside the support of Josh and my professors to take a leave of absence.

I knew I was not in an emotional or cognitive state to learn, let alone serve clients. I knew it was the right decision. And, it reinforced a story I had started telling myself ten years prior when I had to take a leave of absence from my undergrad program for the very same reason: I will never finish anything I start because of my mental health.

It took me a year to get back on my feet.

I worked at a yoga studio and started writing. I picked up photography and made some money doing lifestyle and couples shoots. I wrote affirmations and started sharing my eating disorder story online. I tried, to the best of my ability, to manage shame’s grip.

And for a time, it worked. I was ok. But the panic attacks persisted, and eventually I ended up at urgent care and was given medication to manage the symptoms. I truly had no idea where my life would go from there—I had no job, could barely get through the day without a panic attack, hated my body, hated myself, and believed I was destined to a life of constant failure.

Somehow, still, life unfolded. And as it did, I fell apart and grew up and changed in ways I could not have predicted or even imagined in that year after leaving school.

I left my graduate program in 2017. Five years have passed, and this Friday, I am finally finishing.

If you had sat me down that December in 2017 and asked me what I thought would happen in the five years to come, I promise you that not a single thing that has happened would have come out of my mouth. Not one. And not because they’re all magical or glorious, but because I cannot predict the future, and it never goes how I imagine. But you know what? It goes.

And while I don’t have time or space for the full story of those five years here, I made a list today to remind myself of how much can unfold in life, whether we plan it or not.

(I’ve written stories about almost everything on this list, and included links where I can.)

Since taking a leave of absence from my grad program in 2017, I have:

• Ridden a motorcycle from Seattle to Peru on the Pan-American highway

• Got divorced

• Moved in with my parents and been clueless how I’d get on my feet

• Lived in Bali alone and started my online business

• Wrote a bestselling memoir about my eating disorder, divorce, and mental health

• Shared my story to hundreds of thousands of people on instagram and TikTok

• Published four guided journals to help people with their mental health

• Traveled to Mexico, Scotland and Portugal solo

• Been suicidal, again

• Learned to ask for help and lean on my community

• Relapsed in my Eating Disorder and attended intensive treatment, again

• Got a puppy and fell in love with him (Milo!)

• Made new friends and developed meaningful adult relationships

• Dated, experimented, and worked through sexual trauma

• Been invited to Harvard to attend their first ever mental health creator’s summit

• Shared my story on dozens of podcasts, magazines, and in interviews

And this Friday, FINISH MY MASTER’S DEGREE.

I forget every single day how fucking MONUMENTAL it is that I am alive to see this day come.

That I can never, ever predict what life has in store. That in times when I am certain nothing better is coming for me, I am always proven wrong. That every time I have tried and failed to end my life, life gets better.

And not in a way where it’s better than it used to be. Not in a way where suddenly I’m living in a fucking mansion and don’t worry about my bills or feel lonely or relapse. But in a way where it gets lighter than the dark. In a way where I can’t predict what’s to come, but I can predict something will. And I have to hope—I have to believe—that what’s coming is worth it.

I hope you know that life is worth it. I hope that if you don’t believe it now, I will believe it for the both of us. I hope you know that if it’s dark right now and you’re cloaked with shame, this is a safe place for you to sit. I won’t try to change or fix you—I’ll simply sit with you here until it gets a little lighter.

You are worth it.

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If you are struggling with believing what’s coming is worth it, please know it is brave as hell to ask for help.

Below are some hotlines and resources. Please know as someone who has been suicidal many times I GET that the idea of using these hotlines seems overwhelming and/or like it won’t be helpful. And, sometimes it is not about getting life-changing help right now—it’s about getting through just this moment. Just this moment.

Suicide Hotlines:

Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Text or call “988”
Crisis Text Line: Text "HOME" to 741741 or "START" to 741741
The Trevor Project: (866) 488-7386
crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth ages 13-24
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255 (online chat available)
24 hours a day, 7 days a week
The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender National Hotline: (888) 843-4564
The GLBT National Youth Talkline: (800) 246-7743
youth serving youth to age 25. 
Trans Lifeline: (877) 565-8860

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I am honored as hell to share this story with you, and more honored you’re here reading it.

It’s been a while since I’ve written stories like this, and truthfully it’s because I have been so overwhelmingly proud of how many other people are sharing their stories.

There are more and more people saying “hey, I struggle with this, let’s talk about it,” and that is fucking cool. It’s all I ever wanted when I started writing four years ago. So sometimes, now, I sit in the background and admire all of you. I find my own story less interesting than the ones you share, and know that mine is only one of an infinite number of stories to be told.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart for encouraging me all these years. Our stories matter, because we do. Because life does. Because even if it doesn’t, we get to make it matter, and I hope we do.

All my messy love,
Rach

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Podcasts relevant to this newsletter:

#5 - Rachel Havekost - Learning To Sit In The Not-Knowing & How To Love The Darkest Part Of Yourself