McKayla - Edit 1-Up to 4K

My name is McKayla. I am in fourth year, and I'm from Barbados. I came to Canada as an international student. It was my first time here. My first time being without my family. It was definitely hard. Making an adjustment from coming from a predominantly black society to one where I'm now a minority; it was hard. Issues arose around me adapting to the culture, finding ways to pay for my tuition as an international student, me relating to people in a way that I felt was authentic and that I could be myself. As a student, I handled a lot of disappointment. And this led to me constantly feeling anxious and it became such an integral part of my day-to-day experience that I didn't even think that wasn't the normal way to be living. Since then I've realized that it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to be vulnerable, as hard as it is. The turning point happened when I booked an appointment for counseling. And after going there for a few sessions, it took almost a year later for me to realize that, yeah, these constant feelings of being anxious at the level at which it was, it was such an ongoing state, that was a problem. A big thing with using resources and services available to students is thinking that you are not at a place where it's absolutely necessary to do it, there's a lot of pride in it, there's a lot of thinking of other people. So you want to save those resources for those people. But I've learned that the resources are there for a reason. It's not helpful to wait until it's absolutely necessary and you completely have no choice. It's better to be preventative and take advantage of the things that are offered to you, because you never know, in the future what's going to happen, and you would regret not taking advantage of these things earlier.