Back in the fall, term we had the opportunity to speak with an upper year engineering student about his experiences with fitting in and finding his place in the world. This is his story, with a brief Q&A at the end. If you have a story to share and are interested in being featured on the blog, email us at engsocmha@gmail.com or message one of the directors.

I do not want to share a story where I only talk about me having a mental health issue. I want to talk about what you can learn from your mental health experiences, and bad circumstances surrounding them to continue to be your own amazing self.

When I was growing up I was always very insecure. I used to feel like an outsider or a tag along. Further, I would find that I was very motivated by making the people around me happy, but if I failed at that I would feel like I was worthless. Unfortunately, I have done a lot of that.

This was especially true within the people I was close to. I worked hard to keep them happy, but regardless of my efforts I felt excluded and unhappy. The exclusion was most prevalent at gatherings of our extended family. Because I cannot speak the traditional mother tongue of the family, most of them simply ignored me during these gatherings. I was left alone a lot, and nobody really noticed because they just assumed I was a good, quiet guy. They didn’t realize the isolation I felt because of the language barrier.

Beyond exclusion, I also was subject to judgement from people around me. They are quite traditional so there is a lot of judgement about what activities we participate in and what interests we pursue. Picking ‘wrong’ activities or interests was considered a disgraceful thing. For example, in grade nine I wanted to take history, and geography which would mean sacrificing biology. Somebody in my family wasn’t happy with this plan; they wanted me to study all sciences because in their opinion, the more technical you are, the better future you have (stereotypically speaking). In the end I sacrificed my interests for them, but I was very unhappy in those classes through grades nine and ten.

Outside of my own family I also felt the isolation, particularly during my time in Singapore. While there, there were occasions where people around me from a different ethnicity would look down on me because I was of foreign origin. Even though I was a Singaporean citizen and I did a lot of the same things and had a lot of the same experiences that they did, I was never ever made to feel like a part of the group at times. That was a really unpleasant way to feel, being excluded for an aspect of myself that I have no control over.

From this combination of circumstances, I’ve never been made to feel like I had anybody close to me. I was always an outsider and kept at a distance, and that’s just not a nice feeling. At one point though, something changed. I was watching Steve Job’s Stanford commencement speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc) and I was encouraged to try being myself and doing what I believed in. At that time, I was so inspired. I knew I wanted to change something and do something different, but I didn’t know how I wanted to do that.

To begin with, I decided on just directly defying the people around me. What I mean by that is that if people told me to do something, I would do the complete opposite. Naturally this made them very unhappy and it sparked a literal identity crisis inside of me. My own desire to make the people around me happy came into direct opposition with my new commitment to be myself, and I just didn’t know what to do. That situation that led to a whole lot more anxiety and insecurity. I started feeling more and more insecure about who I was and what I believed in. There was a group of people who expected me to act in one way but there was also a group of people that were unhappy when I tried to act in that expected way. In general I was just very confused about life.

Shortly after that I was also conscripted in the military. While I can say that I survived the two years, many times I was made to feel that who I am as a person was not an accepted way to be. I followed the basic rules, but I just did the minimum. I didn’t suck up to people, and I didn’t do anything extra. During that time was unhappy overall because I was being forced to do things that I did not like or agree with. That said, the whole experience shaped who I am as a person today; I learned that I don’t like people telling me what to do. This had a big influence on my outlook on life because I will not force the people around me to do things they don’t like.

That was the mentality I came into university with. I chose my program because it was something I could connect to strongly. The concepts they were teaching like programming and process improvement were things that I liked, and I also appreciated the chance to interact with people that many other programs don’t have.

For the first year, things went pretty smoothly. I wasn’t really that involved but I was enjoying the university experience. Since then I’ve become incrementally more involved, encouraged by the people around me who appreciated my efforts. Being involved has been an amazing experience for me, one that has broadened my horizons and has taught me many things. However, there have also been less enjoyable parts of being involved. There were days where it felt like I was underappreciated and when people were disagreeing with me just for the sake of disagreeing or because they felt my ideas were wasting their time. This was not just the case with one involvement, but with many different involvements.

I used to come home crying and just sit in my room by myself because I didn’t know what to do. A lot of people have family in Canada to act as a support network but I don’t have that. Everyone is overseas. So I’d sit in my room, crying, entirely overwhelmed and not sure how to keep going.

I’ve always had a vague feeling that people didn’t like me, but I’ve never really understood why. I’ve tried reaching out to them, and asking what I could do differently or how I could improve, but I’ve never gotten proper responses. I got no feedback and that hurt me a lot because I’m always trying to be the best I can for the people around me, but sometimes I just don’t know how.

I find conflict really hard to deal with. In general I try to make the people around me happy, but sometimes in a conflict it’s inevitable that somebody gets hurt. I get into this identity crisis where my desire to please people and my desire to stand up for my own beliefs are hard to reconcile. It puts me in a place where I’m not even sure what I’m living life for or whether what I’m doing is worth it.

Just about everything I’ve done I’ve wanted to quit at one point. When I was in first year I wanted to drop out of engineering because I failed a physics midterm. Yeah, people thought I was just overreacting, but that was what I felt. When I tried to get more involved, people began discouraging me from doing what I was passionate about and that made me not want to be involved.

What I’ve learned from this though is that at the end of the day if there’s one thing that goes right or one person you help, what you’ve done is worthwhile and you shouldn’t give up on it. For me that means I should not stop thinking that I can help people in the way I think is right. I should not stop believing that being friendly and kind to people will lead to good things.

Overall, I’ve started appreciating more and more that a perfect 100% on everything isn’t always going to happen, but even if you’ve just made a small improvement (even by 1%) sometimes that is worth celebrating. I guess the biggest reason I’m talking about this is that I know many people are perfectionists and have developed anxiety for believing that you would not be accepted or liked by people around you if you are not perfect. For many people, nothing less than perfect is not worth appreciating, and that can be a very damaging outlook to have especially with regards to mental health.

I find that people are often too critical of themselves. That’s something I’ve noticed in myself as well as in the people around me. I think in a lot of cases it’s not helpful to be too critical, so I just wanted to share some things that helped me to move past this and get through things.

For me, one thing that has helped a lot is setting goals for the day each morning. Then, before bed I will revisit my goals and see what I’ve accomplished. This helps me live life a day at a time and celebrate the small things which made a big difference in my happiness. I no longer worry so much about the future, I take it a day at a time. Even a small amount of progress you have made in achieving your personal goals is worth celebrating. Lot’s of people get worried that they haven’t made enough progress, but I feel that so long as you are moving in roughly the right direction, any progress is good and is certainly not worth beating yourself up over.

Q: You said you were conscripted in the military. Was that by choice or how did that happen? Also how would you say you changed or grew during your time in the military?

So I’m a Singaporean citizen and all Singaporean males have to serve two years in the military without any questions as mandated by the Singaporean law. So I did have to serve it. I personally never really liked the concept of the military myself, and obviously preparing for my time in the military made me really scared because I would have to do things I did not like. However, when I look back at it now, I actually learned a lot of skills and life lessons during my time. Probably the most important of which was to appreciate yourself for who you are, and to be confident in yourself. I think that of all the discipline the military training provided, that is the one aspect I kept.

Q: You mentioned earlier failing one of your first year midterms, and I know there are probably a lot of students who just got back their midterms and are probably in a similar boat. What is one piece of advice you would tell them or that you would have wanted to hear back then?

Regardless of just how badly your midterms went, don’t beat yourself up over the results. You did study, and you probably do know the concepts even if they didn’t come across on the test. Being confident in your comprehension of the material is really important.

What has to happen now is you need to move forwards. Continue working on your assignments. Find some time to go talk to a TA or your professor about what went wrong on your midterm. Objectively speaking, if you failed a midterm, something has gone wrong. It’s important to talk about that and not just bottle it up inside you. Keeping those negative thoughts with you isn’t healthy and it won’t help you improve in the future. Instead, seek help. There are so many different people you can talk to such as your friends, family, counsellor, or a professor and they can all help you out in different ways, so don’t be afraid to ask.

Q: So you mentioned seeking help from counselling. Have you ever attempted to reach out to counselling either on campus or outside?

As of this term, I attend regular counselling sessions because some of the mistakes I have made have had considerable impacts on me. Counselling has been helpful for this because they have helped me to realize that although I have made mistakes, these mistakes aren’t things I can’t recover from or that I shouldn’t be forgiven for, and I can still continue being myself regardless of whatever happens. Counselling reminds me that I should forgive myself, even if the people around me are not ready to forgive me yet. Now I know that mistakes happen, as long as you learn from them and don’t repeat them they aren’t such a bad thing. It’s when the same mistakes repeat over and over again that they become a big concern. At that point, remember to seek help, that’s what counselling services is there for.

Q: Did you have anything else to add?

I know that at times you may feel alone, and you might think that disappearing is the best thing you can do — I’ve had those moments too. But before you think about ending things, think back to past moments where you’ve done good. Everybody has done good and it doesn’t need to be a big thing. Even actions as small as smiling at a stranger as you walked by can make a big difference in brightening someone’s day. Think about those good moments before you make any decisions.

Also consult somebody. That could be a friend, family, counsellor, a helpline like Good2Talk. Just talk to somebody before making these big decisions.

Lastly, I do consider myself lucky because I have found a good number of friends I can rely on no matter the circumstance.

Q: What song or artist or album are you listening to?

I have been longboarding a lot (until a minor accident), and the song I listen to when I longboard is called Perfect Strangers by Jonas Blue, I still listen to this song to keep myself calm and composed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey_hgKCCYU4