Into My Eyes: Reflections After My First Year at MIT.

Hi! If you’re reading this, then I am assuming that you have probably met me or interacted with me in some capacity. Continue reading if you want, and if you stop here, then that’s quite alright. My plan for this space is to provide myself with a medium to share my thoughts to the world on a wide variety of random topics. The first one will be pretty personal, but I can imagine myself also writing about niche interests of mine or random thoughts that pop up every now and again. Anyways, thank you and I hope you’re having a good one, whoever is behind the screen!

For my first topic, I wanted to talk about something integral in my personal journey as of late, and I suppose there’s no better time than the end of my first year here at MIT. In particular, the recent big thing on my mind has been identity and how that shapes my interactions with the community around me. I think that, for the longest time, I had lost my identity, though I didn’t truly realize this fact until early 2022/late 2021 as my mental health rapidly destabilized. It wasn’t until the transition to MIT that sparked my realization of all this and all of my hidden doubts came in full force for the first time.

For context, although I grew up in a household that provided me with a great deal of support (and genuinely I love my parents, siblings, and especially my grandmother), there was always some emotional barrier present, and the main thing that built my relationship with family was the appeasement of people. As a result of this, I always felt that I needed to live my life for others regardless of the self-expenses that I would undergo. I sought external validation from others very instinctively, and in many ways, it was as essential as breathing for me. Then, there was a natural compulsion for me to compensate and portray myself as someone that I’m not because I felt like I never belonged deep down. Whether it was the friend groups that I was a part of, my family, or whatever, it always seemed difficult for me to feel secure about myself. I felt like I was an outsider and a loner, locking myself away from the rest of the world. I hated letting people into how I thought and bottled my emotions for years. Nobody but I knew. This also sucked because I am definitely someone that valued their personal relationships a lot. For some reason, there was a huge divide between my rational mind and my own self-image. Rationally, I knew that if people were close enough to me, they probably did care, but regardless, I still thought that I wasn’t enough. During high school and years prior, this characteristic of mine was present, but I guess I wasn’t particularly self-aware of it and the damage that slowly brewed in me. Because by the time the transition to college came around, I was, for the first time, alone and independent, and I needed to be fully reliant on myself, which I was definitely incapable of. Thus began my descent into despair. Because how was someone supposed to trust the world around them when they themselves lack trust in their own judgment?

At the beginning, I was doing pretty alright for the most part, joining new activities and trying to adapt to campus life. However, as the months progressed, it gradually became more apparent that I lacked a tremendous amount of self-respect. I wasn’t confident that I could feel both respected and appreciated by other people because I couldn’t find it in me to love myself. For the longest time, I second-guessed every decision and every action I made. I constantly ruminated about the past and how people perceived me. I always thought that I needed to optimize and micromanage situations to feel like I can exert control over every aspect of my life. These traits of mine gradually evolved overtime into unfathomable amounts of self-blame. I blamed myself for being unable to control my thoughts, and I had felt like this has probably damaged or at least strained relationships with people in the past. As the first semester went along, I slowly descended into the worst mental slump of my life. I hated myself for a wide variety of reasons. I lost motivation for a majority of the things that I was doing. From activities on campus to the hobbies that I loved to do during my free time, nothing could prevent my decline. I felt incredibly depressed. 24/7 I was chained to my negative thoughts and only rarely felt fleeting moments of respite. Then comes IAP (January period for a bunch of shit for non-MIT goers) and the new year, I started getting a lot of anxiety attacks and felt truly hopeless. I dropped the IAP classes I was taking, and I tried to use that time to regain my sense of self again. Though my condition steadily grew worse and worse. Before I knew it, I was thrust into the second semester where I would ramp up my class workload with an unfit mental state.

For a large portion of this semester, I had to find myself again, and I really worked on trying to get my mind into a state where I could feel content and satisfied with the world around me. And truly, it was hard. When late March/early April came, a time where I should have been at my most happy (especially because my birthday was around then), I had the worst few weeks of my life. It was utter despair, and to be honest, I started to feel like things were really hopeless and without solution. I can’t imagine that I would have ever fallen through with any ideations, but I can be certain that the mental state was there to enable that to happen. At so many points throughout this school year, I found myself, one way or another, sitting alongside the banks of the Charles, contemplating so much of what lay ahead for me and nearly collapsing in my suffering. It was both physically and mentally excruciating, and I was drained from most of my motivation to do almost anything. Thankfully, during this semester, virtually no one saw how bad it got in real life because it was genuinely pretty ugly. But honestly as of late, when mid-April came around, I think my journey to recovery has gotten a lot better. Since about late February, I’ve gone to therapy multiple times and have gotten prescribed medication, and although it took a while, I think it genuinely helped me. Or rather, I was finally at a place where I could feel comfortable with helping myself and moving forward with open eyes.

I can’t remember the last time I felt sustained happiness for more than a few days at a time for many years now. At minimum, this has been the case since the start of the pandemic, but I'm pretty certain it stems even beyond these last two years. Now, I think I am at the happiest I have ever been, and despite the fact that I’m not entirely motivated to do everything asked of me, I am way more kind to myself. And this Tyler Ea is someone who I think I can accept at long last. I’m never going to hide behind a mask anymore, and I’m never letting myself be possessed by my fears. I’m fully ready to finally be confident in the decisions that I make and without my doubt restraining me at every turn.

If you met me recently, especially in the past year, I do regret the fact that I think you probably did not see a particularly good side of myself, and I think I should have been a bit more upfront with how I was doing. This mainly goes for times in which other people needed to rely on me to do work or something else. I do accept that responsibility going forward, however, and I hope to establish solid relationships going forward.

In voicing this, I wanted to share my story with the rest of the world. I wanted to write about my own perspective and how I think it’s developed recently. This article is probably quite disorganized, but it’s also my first foray into something like this. But yeah. Even though my story is really just beginning, I think I’ve learned quite a bit about myself in a relatively short amount of time. Frankly, now, it’s hard to imagine myself as anything but myself. My main goal is to live for my own happiness and to find people to help accentuate that happiness. I am excited for what’s to come, and I am happy with who I am. Because I'm Tyler Ea and no one will ever fucking change that.

Thank you for reading if you have come this far, and yeah, I will likely write more in the future.