Opinion | How online classes have helped to cope with my anxiety

Tryphena Yeboah, Staff Writer

Here’s the closest I can come to depicting what goes on inside my body before I speak in class:  I start to sweat in my palms and armpits, I feel light-headed, I experience shortness of breath and my heart races so fast that when I look down, I can see the rapid beating through my blouse. And this is only before I speak. Before I make the attempt to raise my hand and participate in a discussion. Before I’m six students away from introducing myself on the first day of class. 

Of course, the rise and fall of my loose fabric is invisible to everyone else but me, and the loneliness of sitting so close to someone while panic shoots through my nerves is yet another world of solitude I trudge through. I admit I am not confident or at ease with social interaction – especially not in an academic environment that’s still relatively new to me.

Before coming to America last year, I was used to the banking system of education in Ghana, where the relationship among teaching and learning is often conditioned in an environment of subordination. There, students find themselves acting as receptacles at risk of simply absorbing information without engaging critical thinking to fully understand it. While I still find myself in the throes of a cultural shock, a specific change that has crippled me has been the participatory culture of the educational system in America. I know; participation is supposed to be good and I have no negative things to say about an environment that fosters collaboration, where students are encouraged to increase their understanding through engagement. And yet, surprisingly, it is this very positive culture that ignites a fraught disturbance inside of me and seizes me to a point where I stutter in my speech, lose my train of thought and feel my fingers shake out of control.

In subsequent weeks I’d speak to my professors about this seemingly small concern and their feedback, of course, was nothing short of encouraging. But regardless, there was still this quiet nudge to do something – this compulsion to prove that I, too, can speak up in class and not make a fool of myself. I have failed terribly in this regard and have stopped sentences midway, coughing up words that made no meaning to me. The act is as clumsy as my trying to navigate my way through a new country.

Yet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that prompted the quick transition to remote learning, I have been immediately drawn into a new world of academia – one where I am not constantly engulfed by this fear of being seen, of getting it wrong, of memorizing a response only to forget it midway. Somehow, watching a class on a screen is less intimidating than an in-person setup. I find myself posting observations and questions in the chat window. A few times, I have wanted to speak; all I’ve had to do is type my observation in a Word document on my desktop and read it from the screen. I still feel the tremble in my voice, but it is nothing like my experience in the past. Discussions on Blackboard have taken on a new significance as I critically engage with a text. There are suddenly more ways of feeling like I’m participating without my nerves throbbing in fear and threatening to burst open.

Indeed, to have the world be hit by such a global crisis did not prepare me for this silent feat. It is no doubt a difficult year, but also one in which I am living each day a little less terrified, and a little more hopeful in class. Because I can, for the first time, participate without becoming crippled by anxiety.