All It Takes Is One: The Friend You Never Knew You Needed

By Colleen Finney

We experience many downfalls as young adults. These bad experiences can derail us off the path to success and happiness...These things can and will affect your entire world, but that's okay.

Often, when you pick up a self-improvement book, you pick u

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041751

Book preview

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All It Takes Is One

All It Takes Is One

The Friend You Never Knew You Needed

Colleen Finney

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Colleen Finney

All rights reserved.

All It Takes Is One

The Friend You Never Knew You Needed

ISBN

979-8-88504-069-3 Paperback

979-8-88504-625-1 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-175-1 Ebook

This book is dedicated to every person who has walked in and out of my life. Although there is a lot of bad in this book, you all helped me find the good parts of life. You helped make me who I am, and I’ll forever be grateful for that.

Contents

Introduction

Part I. People

Chapter 1. Family Isn’t Everything

Chapter 2. Relationships: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Chapter 3. Friends: They Come and Go

Part II. Moments

Chapter 4. The Best and Worst Years of Your Life

Chapter 5. That Will Never Happen to Me

Part III. Internal Struggles

Chapter 6. Normalizing Depression

Chapter 7. The Power of Support with Depression

Chapter 8. The Fear of the Unknown: Exciting, but Oh So Scary

Chapter 9. Accepting Living with the Impossible

Chapter 10. Learning Mental Toughness

Chapter 11. Therapy and Seeking Help

Conclusion

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I woke up at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. I had slept for sixteen hours. I was only awake to eat, shower, and go back to bed like I had done for the past month. I was a junior in college, and I had been living with four complete strangers for about two months after living with my ex for a semester. Depression had completely taken over at this point. I no longer felt in control of my actions. I didn’t care about school, I didn’t care if I did any physical activity that day, and I didn’t even care if I drank any water. Physically and mentally, I was purely in survival mode and did the bare minimum to keep myself alive. This led to a numb feeling, and that’s what terrified me.

It terrified me because I can’t turn my brain off even when I want to. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed that Thursday evening in my Hanes men’s boxers and baggy T-shirt. The sun was setting after a heavy rainstorm. For the first time, my mind was completely silent. Not a single thought went through my head except for an overwhelming amount of fear. Completely numb and scared to death, I knew I needed to get help and take back control of my life.

We experience many downfalls as young adults. These bad experiences can derail us off the path to success and happiness. Whether depression, hard relationships, bad connections or situations with family members, college life, being sexually harassed or assaulted, or a mental or physical condition, the list of downfalls goes on and on. These things can and will affect your entire world, but that’s okay and that’s normal.

Let’s Talk about It

When I first started dealing with depression, I had no intention of telling people and even made my parents promise me that they wouldn’t tell anyone. I was scared to death of what society would think of me if they knew I was struggling mentally. Not until I educated myself did I realize what I was experiencing wasn’t as foreign as I thought it was. Doing research, listening to interviews, and reading statistics about what I had been dealing with helped me see that.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) conducted a survey of students who dropped out of college and found that 64 percent of them dropped out because of mental illness. Forty-five percent of those did not seek help on campus before dropping out (Gruttadaro1 and Crudo 2012). Society leads us to put mental health on the back burner, but mental health is just as important, if not more so, than physical health. Although millennials and Generation Z are normalizing conversations about mental health, we still have far to go.

The same goes for family estrangements. When I was twelve, and my big family quickly turned into a smaller one due to a family falling-out, I thought I was the only one and often wondered why this was happening to my family. When I got to high school, I realized there are many families out there going through something similar. According to Scientific American, a large survey of young adults, all college and graduate students at universities in the northeastern US, found that about 17 percent experienced estrangement from an immediate family member, most commonly from the father. Surveying older adults found that about 12 percent were estranged from a child or children(Savvy 2020). When you realize that you’re part of that percentage, it makes a big difference in how you view your own situation.

Realizing also that I was one of hundreds of thousands of women (and men) who are sexually assaulted or harassed each year opened my eyes to my own traumatic experience with sexual assault (SA). Nationwide, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (Kearl 2018). When I saw this statistic, I knew I had to share my story if 81 percent of women have been in my shoes.

In the last decade or so, we have made major strides countrywide with the stigma revolving around mental health. More people are talking about it and more people are going to therapy, but we have only scratched the surface of what can be done to further emphasize how important mental health should be. I think this can be done through more people being vulnerable and sharing their own struggles.

I believe it’s time we start normalizing things like struggling through college, families parting ties, and sexual assault. We need to share our stories and realize that mental health is not only real, but a major component of our everyday lives. We must start respecting the struggles young people go through, giving them the tools they need to process and heal so they are able to live a beautiful life. We need to be able to look at them and say, You are strong for speaking up and getting the help you need.

This Book Can Be Your Friend

Often when you pick up a self-improvement book, you pick up one written by a psychologist or someone with career experience in mental health or therapy. The beauty of this book is that I’m just a normal twenty-two-year-old trying to find myself and navigate the world. Through my own personal journey with mental health, I have developed the passion and real-life experience necessary to write a book like this. I always swore I’d never tell my stories or be vocal about my journey until I wrote a blog post about my depression. The feedback I got was overwhelming and made me curious to know others’ stories.

Because of this, not only is telling my own story important, but sharing the stories of many of my peers—average students and adults just like me—is important as well. Many of their stories and experiences helped me heal in a way I never thought possible. In addition to sharing my personal journey and the journeys of those I’ve interviewed, I have filled my brain with books, podcasts, and TED talks that support the challenges I present in these pages