About a month ago, my Psychology class started studying unit 2. At the onset of this unit, our teacher smiled apologetically and said, “Now, I feel it’s only fair to warn you before we start. When you’re studying psychological diseases and their symptoms, you’ll start diagnosing yourself with every chemical imbalance and disease you read about. You don’t have them, OK? Everyone feels depressed sometimes, and everyone has trouble concentrating at times, and everyone gets the shakes occasionally… it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, OK? So don’t stress about it.”
At the time, this sounded like a really weird warning. Was she sure the entire class would start diagnosing themselves with everything we studied? But… why would we do that? It didn’t sound like a very rational — or likely — thing for us all to start doing. As a result, I completely disregarded this warning… and let my guard down.
I haven’t been feeling well today. It’s probably one of those all-too-common winter bugs, but a really weird one: no coughing, no sneezing, no sore throats, no aching joints. Instead, I feel like I’m just… not functioning. It’s hard to say that, because I clearly am getting by. It’s just that there’ve been so many little lapses in… functioning… and since we were studying neural diseases all morning they seemed a lot more significant than usual. Read on…