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First term was a bit of a nightmare for me- it was almost a process of trying to rediscover myself in a sense. Maybe it had something to do with coming to terms with the fact that I no longer had to be the same person that everyone knew me as back home. This blanket of expectation had been lifted; it was a breath of fresh air, yet I was struggling to take it in.\u00a0I had a tight grip on the past and I didn’t really know how to let go.<\/p>\n
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I started off Fresher’s Week (fortnight, actually)<\/em>\u00a0just fine but quickly began finding all of it both overwhelming and underwhelming. Underwhelming because honestly, the whole Fresher’s Week thing kind of felt overrated and way too hyped up; but overwhelming because there was so much going on- so many new names and faces. It came to a point where I honestly had close to no interest in socialising with people in general. And this scared me. All my life, I had been tagged as the\u00a0social butterfly <\/em>of the bunch.<\/p>\n Everything seemed to keep getting worse. I felt like Alice- falling down what seemed like this unending rabbit hole of gloom. Next thing I knew- I was practically not going in for anything because the only thing I wanted to do was curl up in bed, watch Netflix and video call my boyfriend. (Long distance sucks- even though he’s only at Southampton for uni. HI JOHN, MISS YOU! Medicine at Imperial > Medicine at Southampton. Fight me.<\/em><\/strong>)<\/p>\n It reached a point where I was becoming overly demotivated and began losing interest in the one thing I had worked so hard for- Medicine. I’m struggling to put how it felt into words but it was almost like being stuck in time as everything and everyone else carried on past you. I spent days on end questioning whether I belonged at Imperial and whether I belonged at medical school. I was petrified that I was ‘burning out’ already and that maybe the best option for me was to drop out before I proved to be even more of a disappointment. Like nobody mentioned\u00a0frequent breakdowns and existential crises<\/em> as part of the uni life description, am I right? Or maybe I just missed the memo- huh.<\/p>\n As a quick overview- I have since pulled myself together with the help of my boyfriend; some counselling at Imperial; seeing a GP and being put on medication; and most importantly, finding my best friends here. Shoutout to Anush, Trish, and Prak- who have so graciously put up with my bossiness and mad google sheets for our current property search. Love you guys :’)<\/em><\/p>\n Sending all my love (and all the luck in the world for those of you who have exams)<\/em>, As the academic year comes to an end, I thought I’d reflect on my first year at university. Here’s the thing- we all have a tendency to sugarcoat. We share all the good, but seldom the ‘bad’ times. Sure, there’s the occasional (or frequent) posts about workload and stress; but how many of us actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1157,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[420,385,148187,200866,81449,12154,1,92291,123757],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college","category-imperial","category-life-at-imperial","category-medical-school","category-mental-health","category-stress","category-uncategorized","category-uni-life","category-year-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3733"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3757,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3733\/revisions\/3757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/Dqyziru9dtHaw\/giphy.gif\")
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\nAs I desperately need to get back to cramming for exams, I will unfortunately have to put off elaborating on my journey to the ‘light side’ for the time being.<\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/3oEjHP5Nvv5N6RZFoA\/giphy.gif\")
In the GIF above, you will find footage of me being attacked by tube doors. I am actually Carrie Bradshaw.<\/p>\n
\nAlex (:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"