Editor's note: This story mentions a suicide attempt. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 9-8-8, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
A Princeton student recently won the Paul Simon Essay Contest. This essay highlights Illinois community colleges. The student shares how her college embraced her after she returned following a not-so-great start.
Lauren Frost is a student at Illinois Valley Community College in Oglesby, Illinois. The contest is sponsored by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association and offers a five-hundred-dollar scholarship. The student must describe, “How My Community College Has Changed My Life.” Frost said she loves writing, but essay writing wasn't a part of her repertoire.
“I'm somebody who likes to use a lot of words, and there was the 500-word limit, and I was like, oh my goodness, I don't know how to like put this all into just 500 words.”
She said she is used to creative writing and has done this since she was a child. The other thing Frost loved to do was play the Trumpet. She said she wasn’t a great player and the other kids often made fun of her.
“And so, I decided, well, I'll go into elementary education just because it was something that, you know, I knew people did. I knew it was a job option,” she said. “And so, I was like, well, I'll go into that. Um, and that didn't work out very well. I didn’t really like the classes that I had, and I didn't have a very big passion for it either. So, um, and along with that, my mental health was definitely declining. I was very depressed.”
She ended that semester with a 0.429 GPA. That was in 2021. She decided to take a break. Frost said things came to a head in May of 2022. At the age of 18, she said she tried to take her life and ended up in the hospital. Frost said after that, she went to therapy to get help.
“I ended up finding out that I had, ADHD, depression, and then, schizotypal personality disorder,” she continued, “dependent personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder, which was quite the diagnosis.”
Frost said she originally noticed something wasn’t right with her mental health when she was in seventh grade. Back then she talked to her friends and parents about her concerns.
“And they'd kind of just chalk it up to being, you know, just like going through puberty,” she said.
Frost said in the fall of 2022 she decided to enroll in IVCC again. This time she took her passion for music and mixed it with something she felt helped her maneuver through life – taking care of her mental health. Her intent was to major in social work. But one of her first classes was music appreciation. She said it set the tone for her and helped her with her anxiety. This led her to pursue an education in music therapy.
“There's always the connection that you make with people when you play music with them, of course. I mentioned that before, but even then, listening to music is like an underrated tool to help,” she explained.
Frost said her mom was the one who told her to submit an essay for the contest. Those paragraphs detailed her journey to wellness and how the college helped with that.
“And to this day, nobody ever comments on, you know, how badly my first semester there went,” she said. “And it’s always just kind of been talking about the future and what happens next.”
Frost said mental health is not talked about the way it should be. She encourages open discussions about mental health and says it is important to speak with a therapist.
Frost is scheduled to read her winning essay at the college’s commencement ceremony on May 18th.
