Each Other's Daydreams

 I am a day dreamer. When I am somewhere I don’t want to be, I daydream about the better places this unenjoyable moment can lead. In the depths of my depression, I daydreamt about walking across the stage at my Lawrenceville graduation. Until COVID took that away from me.

I wasn’t sure if I would attend Lawrenceville’s Class of 2020 graduation this summer. I told myself that high school was far behind me and that very few of my best friends would be able to make the weekend trip back. But it’s the midnight before I finally walk across my high school graduation stage and I can’t fall asleep, despite my alarm set to go off in five hours so that I can open Playa Bowls before.

This is the day I had daydreamt about a year before my graduation. On those nights when I felt like ending it, I thought about that graduation stage. I would finally achieve what felt like the impossible; I would know that I was good enough for Lawrenceville.

My Lawrenceville experience was a miraculous journey. In hindsight, I had struggled with mental health my entire life – I tried leave this earth in middle school but, even then, I didn’t go through a depressive spell quite like I did at Lawrenceville. Instead, it took the heightened pressure and extraordinary stress of the Lawrenceville School’s social, athletic, and academic culture for my mental illness to display itself.

It started with sobbing after my first AAA girls ice hockey game, when I was paired on defense – a position I had never played – with Lawrenceville’s top player, a Princeton hockey commit and future U18 USA National player. She later would become my best friend at Lawrenceville, but she will never fail to remind me that our first conversation was via text after that game when she texted me that I did a great job (because her parents saw me crying in the parking lot and told her to text me). 

It next displayed itself in the countless nights I stayed awake until 3 and sometimes 4 in the morning just to complete a simple homework reading, in petrifying fear that I wouldn’t have anything good enough to say around the Harkness table if I was not adequately prepared for the next day’s class. It continued to show itself in my hockey and academic life as normal emotions that seemed to take over my entire being, and then it infiltrated into my social life. I was uncomfortable in my own skin around other people, always. I developed an extreme anxiety disorder, questioning every action I did and every word I said around other people. I was always on edge.