I'm genuinely left speechless every time this discussion arises. There's no answers to this, really. It's something I personally struggle with on a day-to-day basis and something I can't explain to a lot of people. People will never understand, and this perpetual cycle of opinionated dissonance continues. I feel like so many people are so hopelessly stuck. You don't know what's keeping someone alive, you don't know what each person goes through, and not everyone is built how you were. I know people that are resilient enough to face failure and keep going, and I also know people who have not been raised to have the same heart. Speaking to some people about what has occurred at my school over the last couple months, one things I heard about the last student was "what's wrong with these wasteman first years bro it's not even that hard." Another common response about suicide is it's "cowardly", or "selfish." I'm the type of person to approach everything with humour so I have troubles sharing my actual opinions a lot of the time so I have no comments thereof, but regardless of where you identify on the spectrum, you're in the same system as everyone.

The place I'm in cultivates an atmosphere of competition - but I can't see any other way around that either. Humans are fundamentally built to survive through adversity. What's wrong with this picture? How can we ever fix an educational system that's so ubiquitously established? Academia requires numbers, rankings, and real, hard work and there's no alternative for it. It's more than just grades and a job. so much is expected of people, especially my age, and it does get overwhelming sometimes. I'm a human being. It goes further than cultivating a warm, loving Twitter aesthetic for one day by tweeting a simple "#BellLetsTalk" just to take a mildly contrarian stance to such a deep-rooted issue, and letting people know that they supposedly can talk to you for some favourites on your timeline. It goes further than raising a paltry amount to contribute towards avenues for combatting stigma, paradoxical as we see more and more people fall into the trap of expectation. It goes further than just being strong enough to handle things.

I hear the same shit from every single "help session." Get organized, make a schedule, talk to someone, find some hobbies, your family/friends are here to help, share the load, make time for yourself, don't take things on alone, all of that sort. To avoid being too cynical, I don't want to imply that the aforementioned approaches don't help, because they definitely do. Some cases are not too severe, and they really help shape up a person for the short term. But what about the long term? Not everything can be tailor made to suit every specific person's needs. Not every person stands the same mental ground, not every person has the same capabilities, not every person will find solace in making a fucking schedule to sit, work, and rot over things they don't understand in the first place. And I think it's ironic that with everything in place to facilitate learning and designed to help students, the rate at which we build methods of support </= the rate at which we increasingly face issues. But the honest answer is that there is no answer.

From the perspective of a student at a school with a reputation of being one of the best at what it does, it's hard to uphold expectations and balance jobs with a rigorous curriculum. The only discussion to be had is that with the suffering party firsthand - in any case. Who understands you better than you? I wish more people would talk, and look for transparency between you and whatever's giving you troubles. I don't care if you're in engineering, humanities and social sciences, math, whatever. The only thing I can't stand is people not doing anything for themselves. Things do get hard and it's difficult to find the mentality/motivation to do it, but please try to shape up, work hard, try to see things through. I know not everyone has the same kind of attitude towards this, but I think it becomes increasingly important to have these discussions when things get bad. My entire class has been having problems as of late. We've organized sessions with our associate chair, as well as had discussions with our profs, all to take steps to reprimand and revamp facets of our system.

As mentioned earlier, it's not an easy answer. Personally, I believe that there's ultimately nothing that can be done to 100% avoid this, and I'm not really a fan of the clichés that are in nature of this topic. I just woke up from a nap and even sitting here writing this I’m thinking “wow I should really be doing some work right now.” The grind is real, numbers/rankings do exist, it’s all necessary, the system exists, it’s important, but so are you. Everyone's different. But we can definitely take some steps. It just takes a little bit of effort, a little bit of heart, and some help. I'm disheartened how much suffering happens in silence, and I hope people can take some time to themselves to look into things in light of recent events especially. This negative attitude is something that plagues your health and it gets worse as years pass. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but it is that we are powerful beyond measure" is literally the dumbest quote ever, it makes absolutely no sense. Because I'm scared. I'm scared of letting my friends down, terrified of letting my parents down, and afraid to let my friends down. I can't fail, I can't lose. Mentioned or unmentioned, here's to everyone becoming a little bit stronger physically, mentally, emotionally, and finding your answers to respective own problems. Just something I wanted to share, hope you have a great day and I wish you the best - take care. 🌞