As of late, I’ve been struggling with balancing school and my personal life. Everyone warned me that my freshman year was going to be hard, but I feel like the universe just chose to make mine extremely complicated. My biggest struggle has been maintaining and protecting my own peace.
I’m an emotional individual, and I tend to love really hard, so it’s incredibly easy for me to get wrapped up in other people’s feelings and their life problems. Now I’m sure that everyone reading this is probably going to say things like “Just stop caring” or “Ignore them,” but I can’t. I’ve tried many detachment techniques, and they all seem to have failed.
Recently, I’ve been involved with a pretty toxic person that’s relatively close to me all the time. They have been struggling with mental health issues, and since I’m the only person readily available to them, they depend on me for mental and emotional counseling. I love the person very much, however, these constant emotional and mental struggles have been dragging me down as well. There are times where I now wake up feeling drained, even though I had done nothing but go to class the day before.
I’ve been skipping classes on what seems like a regular basis, and it’s just starting to worry me. As a freshman, I’m hyper aware that I have to set a routine and stay focused to ensure that my freshman year goes smoothly. However, being who I am, I feel like I’ve just absorbed all the person’s negative energy and I need to release it.
At first, I thought about abandoning her and just leaving the relationship completely. I know it’s toxic to me, and I need to get away from it as soon as possible. However, almost instantaneously, I felt this overwhelming sense of guilt. I imagined myself to be this selfish person because I essentially wanted to abandon the person and the relationship that we had cultivated over the past year.
I have been battling with what to do about the situation for the past couple of weeks, and I came to the solution that I should move out of the dorm we share and that we should go our separate ways. Everyone else in my life supported that decision, and it started to appear to be the right thing more than ever.
Still, I ended up not feeling right all over again. Suddenly, I realized that in preparation to moving out, that I had already mastered detachment. I had been giving her space and I kept doing my thing. In the end, I realized that moving made me more uncomfortable than staying and that I could very well manage the situation without doing so.
Things may definitely continue to be strenuous, however, I’m getting more involved on campus, and I won’t have to be around her all the time anymore. I’m honestly just glad that I now know how to detach in a healthy manner and that I handled this in the most mature way possible.