In a world filled with different people, minds, and thoughts: I've always wondered why people act the way they do, about how they talk, about how they walk, about how they think. I’ve started taking AP Psychology this year and I learned things that many people might not know about their own brain. I now can tell whether a person's actions are coming from a cognitive or fundamental standpoint, if they have a developed morality, and what would happen if the myelin sheath was moving too slow and affected brain neurons in a negative way. From a young age, I never knew why people would treat me how they did, I would always wonder if it was my own fault. But, since taking this course as a junior in high school I have begun seeing my life within the pages of a textbook.

I got diagnosed with anxiety when I was seven years old. As I grew up I noticed how when I felt anxious my legs would shake. I would become nauseous and then I would cry because my stomach hurt then cry more because I didn’t know why my stomach hurt. When I told my grandmother and mother I was nervous I was going to cause myself harm and I was scared of myself, they took me to the ER to speak to a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with depression when I was eleven. I blamed myself, I thought that I was too sensitive and too weak of a person. Now years later, taking psychology class and reading about the brain and its functions has made me realize that these thoughts weren’t because I was not good enough, it was because my amygdala, hippocampus, and my dorsomedial thalamus were not functioning properly and I learned that the overactivity of the amygdala most likely will create a cognitive bias towards interpreting the world, and self, negatively. It felt good to learn this. I finally understand that having these mental illnesses aren’t my fault and I was not being “extra.” I understand it wasn’t my fault because I can not control how my neurons connect. I was born like this and had no choice but to get help and embrace my depression and anxiety as part of who I am.

Although my psychology class helped clear up many events and experiences from my past that used to confuse me, learning more about psychology has also made some events even harder for me to understand. When I was fourteen years old, one friend had a crush on me. It has made me remember one series of events in particular. He’d talk to me everyday and I noticed whenever we were in a group setting whenever he would tell a joke he’d see if I was laughing. Fourteen-year-old me didn’t take this seriously and I usually laughed at the jokes. Eventually it was clear to him I did not like him the way he liked me. Directly after this realization, the simple jokes I would laugh at turned into sexual assault threats where I found this no longer funny but others were still laughing. His jokes went from things I found funny to calling me names like “a hoe”, making fun of my body and telling me when I am older I was going to be raped by grown men. To this day, it is hard for me to understand how somebody could not have an understanding of empathy in their anterior insular cortex, or simply how someone could say such awful things to somebody else.

The study of psychology has exposed me to the secrets of human life, and I've come to the realization that learning more about how the brain works helps me better understand some experiences in my life, but can’t always give me all the answers to why people say the things they say, or do the things they do. Even as I understand more about people, I realize that there are some things I may never understand.

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