Yesterday, I humiliated myself in front of the whole class.

Most days now, I feel that I have my mind back—that I can actually think without anxiety and malfunctioning cognitive processes clouding my every thought. But every once in a while, I do something really strange or stupid, and I find myself truly questioning my recovery all over again.

Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and anyone may occasionally forget words, get distracted, or misunderstand instructions. However, when I do any of those things, I’m immediately taken back to a time when I did them all the time and every day—a time when I had no business even living independently, let alone attempting college. I get more upset than your average person would whenever I slip up, because I never know if my cognitive blip is what a typical person might experience or if it’s a lingering symptom. Every potential symptom sends me into bad memories and fear of history repeating itself.

My embarrassment yesterday happened when I was called up in front of the whole class to demonstrate a new concept on the board (one that I knew very well from studying). I went into auto-pilot, and I made an extremely elementary mistake. Even worse, I didn’t notice until my professor said something and asked me to try again.

“Oh, wow! That was pretty silly,” I said, as the whole class snickered. “What was I thinking?”

To make matters worse, over the last week, I’ve been wondering about and bracing myself for another mild flare. My cognition hasn’t been quite right for a few days. I’ve been really anxious and borderline depressed, and I’m having trouble starting assignments due to anxiety. I’ve had problems taking handwritten notes in class, because even though I know how to spell, my hands frequently write words and letters in the wrong order, or I write the wrong letters all together. And then there’s the fact that my physics textbook was christened with my own tears over the weekend, because I was having such a hard time understanding the material.

But if this is a flare, then why am I not ticking any more than usual? Why is my OCD not getting out-of-control?

Because I’m not flaring. And I’m certainly not stupid. I’m just sleep-deprived and under a tremendous amount of stress, and I’m realizing that college is hard for everybody. Yes, I do have some added PANS difficulties still—the handwriting issues and my legs not listening to my brain after I climb stairs or walk up a hill (more on this later). But who doesn’t get frustrated by physics homework? Who doesn’t have compromised cognition after not sleeping enough? Who doesn’t get anxious when trying to get school work done while awaiting a pending internship offer?

I suppose it’s still possible that I could be about to flare, but I’m choosing to reject that idea. This time, the solution to my struggles is not a Prednisone burst or a switch in antibiotics, but simply going to bed earlier and trying not to beat myself up over what happened in class yesterday.

Over the years, I’ve had to learn how to be sick—how to appear to function, how to live as much as I could, and how to mentally get through the heartbreak of PANS when I couldn’t keep myself together at all. But now, I have to learn how to be healthy—how to deal with embarrassment and challenging classes and stress and all the ups-and-downs of a healthy person’s life.