hey i'm jose mourissajeski um i'm 24
years old
i'm a student right now about to get my
bachelor's degree
um and and yeah my my life so far has
been filled with academic struggles
well you know what i actually had
my struggles i would say aren't
necessarily academic there
with my mental health
but they
showed themselves
through my academics
and then my poor academics
deal with my poor mental health
Elementary School
the first
signs of this were when i was pretty
young in elementary school
i would always get the same classic
note home every year from from every
teacher
they would write something along the
lines of almost word for word for my
parents hey uh your kid he's you know
really smart really good but he just
doesn't apply himself
very smart but lazy because i guess
that's just the natural
answer the natural conclusion when you
have someone that you think is
intelligent but isn't performing well i
guess
High School
reason high school very
very very bad lots of c's and d's
i
almost didn't graduate high school
days before
walking the stage for graduation
i'm frantically
writing emails my emails essays i'd
write like 10 essays for this online
course
getting the graduating barely
but internally i'm like i know i'm
i do love learning i love academics this
is for me
by this point in my life
at the end of high school i'm realizing
other things about myself and my mental
health like
like i
have really bad anxiety and depression
and
and so i'm kind of like trying to
connect certain dots and i'm like okay
maybe
you might exactly depression is
why i can't
follow through in school maybe
something about
having a bunch of assignments makes me
so anxious that i shut down
that from the outside looking in it
looks like laziness because
because i would sit down at the computer
i have 10 things to do
and then instead of doing any of them i
would go lie down
you know go back to bed or something
and so it was hard to
it was hard to even realize for myself
like that that's not laziness
i'm not just sitting down laying down
because i want to lay down
i'm laying down because i'm having
you know an increased heart rate i'm
feeling nauseous stick to my stomach
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and that's a really frustrating thing to
have to explain to people
because again from the outside looking
in they only see that you're not doing
the work
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College
i i constantly had like this uh
tip on my shoulders
i did like because i have to prove
to people and to myself
that i can
you know succeed
and
for whatever reason i decided that the
best way to do that
would be to take on
the hardest thing that i could
uh
because you know if i could do this then
everyone will see that and they'll be
like oh
he is actually a
smart guy not lazy
so
i found a very difficult major
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uh actuarial science
and
i went to college
i got into a college that had very
minimal
uh
acceptance qualifications
but yeah and then when i got there i
took on a
more than a full load of classes
and it resulted in disaster
how bad were your grades
i have multiple semesters with straight
and were you partying a lot during that
time were you still trying hard
uh
funny enough as much as i was at a party
school
and i would like to attribute my
failures to you know me being super cool
and partying and having fun i did not
really party
i
went to a couple parties i think in my
entire career at that school
yeah i know instead of partying i
stayed up late you know crying and
waking up in cold sweats
freaking out wondering i'm gonna put it
all together
um
and uh
and lying so i spent a lot of energy
lying to myself and i could get real
creative with my lives too it's kind of
amazing what you can do when you learn
ways that you can convince yourself for
something to
to save your feelings i guess
for example one common
tactic that i would use every semester
and it always works without fail
is uh
at the beginning of every semester you
know you get a syllabus
with the breakdown of your grade you
know 30 on the final 20 from the midterm
10 from this assignment 10 from that
assignment
and so
every time i would
say miss an assignment or
fail to study for a midterm i would be
able to open up the
the syllabus
do some quick math
and say hey you know
midterms only 20 of my grade
all i have to do is knock out
you know 10 points on it
and i could still get
a b in the class that's not that bad
and then you know two weeks later
the next quiz is coming up and i'm like
yeah it's only five percent of my grade
i don't need to study for that
of course
that makes no sense
and if you
just eliminate 30
of your grade that means on the rest of
the class including the final you need
to get a hundred percent on everything
but
i was very good at ignoring those kinds
of facts
depression and anxiety um
i ended up getting diagnosed because
i was having eating problems i lost a
lot of weight
um
the
dorm that i was living in on campus
i had like a communal
food court you know communal area
and every time i would go outside of my
dorm
to eat
you know be around all my peers i would
get so
anxious
that i'd get sick to my stomach and i
couldn't eat
uh which was a problem because we had
limited
uh
access
to the food court
so if i go to the food court and don't
eat then i just wasted one
swipe of my of my food card
and that just happened way too much i
lost so much weight because every time i
went to the food court i
would want to throw up and i mean i'd
sit down for like
90 minutes two hours
uh just waiting like
for for myself to chill out so i can you
know
maybe
have a salad or something
uh and so that's when
my i finally spoke to my doctor and he
decided to put me on something for it
i was basically put on an antidepressant
that
did its job i guess it kind of
inhibited my anxiety
but it had a slew of other side effects
that were undesirable
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like a
fatigue a mental and physical fatigue
and
i wouldn't say that my doctor prepared
me
to understand that that was going to be
a side effect
so this is kind of detrimental because
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because here you know i already have
this
um predisposition to thinking that i'm
lazy
i'm already
very self-conscious about that
idea
uh and so when i started taking this
drug
and i didn't really know like it's gonna
make me physically fatigued
and now all of a sudden
in the middle of every single day i
crash and i feel like i need to
take naps like i would literally feel
like i need to take naturals randomly
so eventually i just took myself off the
drug
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yeah i really noticed it was a breaking
point when i would get up in the morning
head over to my laptop open up my email
maybe or just look at anything and
anything i'd
open anything i'd want to do
i i
see
a massive
list of things that i've missed over the
last two weeks all the assignments i've
missed all the professors that have
tried to reach out to me because i've
missed the last four lectures
and so you know i
see all that and say this is a problem
how can we alleviate the
the
the stress and the pain of looking
through all of the looking through all
of this
and of course there's the right option
and that's
you know
call your grandparents and tell them how
you're really doing
email your professor tell them why you
haven't been to class
but that's really really hard
it was inconceivable as an option to me
and so that's when my mind would
get just a bit
more creative and
say maybe i
find myself looking out the
window of my apartment or you know
hanging out on the balcony
and you don't have to be very creative
to come up with
say some faster ways to alleviate your
pain
in that situation
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Back Home
and so
i
ended up having to
complain about everything i dropped out
of school went back home with mom and
dad
felt like an absolute failure
i took a bit of time off school i sat
out the next semester and i immediately
got a
Working
i was washing dishes you know in a nice
restaurant
which uh
sucked it was bad it was pretty bad
um i will say
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that it was a really important step for
me
because along with being home with me
with my parents
i i just got and working in this
restaurant i got to meet a lot of people
and having to work washing dishes
i was forced every day to go out and
interact with people you know people are
counting on me to do a job as opposed to
when i'm in school
you know i get to get
and
convince myself that you know i'm only
hurting myself so i never felt
responsible for missing classes
um
but at work
i had this
i have to go to work i can't i can't
just work because there are people that
i like that i respect counting them
to to do my job even though you know i'm
just washing dishes
it doesn't matter like if so that's
important of a job in a restaurant
i would ruin people's evenings
if i didn't show up to work
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which is good that was good pressure
and it got me
up out of bed to
to get a job no matter what the job was
it got me to go do something every day
Community College
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took a semester off school i enrolled at
a community college
local um
and so after a few months of just
washing dishes
um i i did return to taking some classes
and this time i actually did
take a few classes at a time
and honestly the only reason i did that
was because i was working and so
it really didn't make sense to take a
pull up
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how did you fare in those classes
did you do the same things and couldn't
get work done or somehow just
miraculously thinks about it
so
i had extra motivation this time
because
i hated washing dishes so much
that
whenever i thought about missing an
assignment or missing a lecture
i think about how much i hate
washing dishes until you know midnight
one in the morning
i was immediately faced with kind of the
same
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the same
roadblocks that i was used to
you know i would i would
get my assignments and
feel overwhelmed and i would
be so tempted to pull out that syllabus
and figure out what if i missed this
assignment can still pass
but i i just decided i'm not going to
let myself fall down that path
and at this point i'm
taking on as many classes as i was at
university
and i'm working
a lot like 25 to 30 hours a week at a
restaurant
and before i know it
you know i'm a week after the semester
week past the semester
and i'm at work and i'm going on my
break and my phone buzzes and i get an
email
i don't know maybe my grades at this
point
i can barely even grasp that
semester's
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congratulations so they
uh your performance this semester blah
blah blah
you've been selected to
you know be awarded the dean's list
award
and i don't know exactly what
the requirements are for that award but
i assume they're good
uh
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so i immediately went to my car
thankfully i was on break so i could do
this
and i cried
a lot
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and i just keep it going so you know
next semester
same result dean's list
and so finally i'm in this position
where you know i i have that option do i
go back to university do i first or
pursue a
four-year degree
i ended up going to cal state los
angeles
i spend
a few semesters there
and and i continue performing well
but at some point i think in like my
third semester
at university
um my depression and anxiety had looked
really really hard
i was in enough of a dark place to
see therapy
three out of five times i would describe
something
and she my therapist would give me like
a ah
and i thought what what what is going on
and eventually she said you're you know
you're describing a bunch of things and
i know you have anxiety and depression
but a lot of these issues you're
describing are
not related to any dietary depression
and eventually she told me she's like
dude you have
you have really bad adhd
so i guess for the first 20 years of
your life
nobody ever mentioned the positive adhd
even during that official diagnosis
whereas they'll definitely have
depression but just somehow
adhd just went like under the radar
would i imagine
hyperactivity to be
is
someone
in a conversation
and then and then as you're talking to
them
they see like a butterfly moving over
there and they go oh butterfly and then
they'd run to chase the butterfly
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and i'd also imagine
someone
being really rude in class for example
like let's say a teacher is like a child
like a child in class making noises and
throwing things
and i guess i guess the reason i didn't
see myself and no one else saw me is
because i was like
i was hyperactive but i was a
well-behaved child
you
