“It’s not the end of the world unless it’s the end of the world,” someone told me recently. “And if it’s the end of the world, then there’s nothing you can do about it.”

For an anxiety-ridden person like myself (and like most Northwestern students), this already sounds like pretty solid advice. But as someone who survived what I once thought to be the apocalypse of my social and professional life on this campus, I can confirm that this advice is completely, painfully true. No matter how catastrophic something might seem at the time, if you refuse to let other people beat you down—or to beat yourself down—you will be okay.

Around this time last year, I wrote an article for the North by Northwestern spring magazine. Initially, this article seemed just like any of the dozens of other stories I’ve written over my four years as a journalism student. I enjoyed reporting it, but the piece wasn’t especially challenging or thrilling. Yet that article triggered one of the most formative experiences of my Northwestern career.

Here’s what you need to know: The article was about an illegal drug delivery service, based in Evanston. Within hours of its publication, that service shut itself down (temporarily). And while I had worried about retaliation from the people who ran the service, I never considered the possibility that my fellow students would turn against me.

My email and social media profiles immediately flooded with messages from people I had never met, condemning me for the article. The word “Cartergate” trended on Yik Yak, thanks to anonymous musings on my (apparent) stupidity and on how long it would be before drug dealers and/or Northwestern students “came for” me. Some people did offer legitimate ethical criticism, but I was so unprepared for the onslaught of personal attacks that I was paralyzed into silence.

I walked around in a PTSD-like haze, flinching whenever someone walked too close to me on the sidewalk. Could they have posted the Facebook status that had called me a “thot,” slut-shaming me for something that had nothing to do with sex? Or maybe they were just one of the hundred people who had liked the status? Or maybe they were even the author of my personal favorite Yak, which pointed out that I “looked like a good hate fuck”? (In other news: Being a woman is always so fun!) I knew rationally that very few people on campus actually cared about Cartergate, that these “haters” were just the loud minority—but it was kind of hard to remember that when my adviser asked me if I wanted to spend the night at her house, because she was afraid for my safety.

How did I cope? I made self-deprecating jokes. I ate everything I wanted to. I burst out crying during lunch at my sorority. Every message of support that I received, from friends and strangers alike, was a life raft. But eventually, I managed to stop obsessively checking Yik Yak. After all, I had finals to worry about.

Like all Internet frenzies, Cartergate faded after a few days. (Thanks to the cancellation of Dillo Day, NBN wasn’t even the most hated student group on campus anymore. #winning.) I deleted my Yik Yak app, worked and travelled throughout the summer, and finally returned in the fall, cynical and cautious about returning to campus media.

Then, through a constellation of circumstances, my feature for the NBN fall magazine ended up being chosen as the cover story. I had taken much more care with this story, not only because of Cartergate’s looming legacy, but also because I truly cared about the subject and wanted to do right by my interviewees. Still, in the days before publication, I could barely sleep. I tinkered with the story’s phrasing and punctuation endlessly, trying to find the magic combination that would save me from criticism. I even thought about begging my editors to take the piece off the cover and bury it within the magazine, so that I could go on being mercifully ignored.

Still, I knew I had to go through with it. No, I wanted to go through with it—to be selected as the cover felt like an honor by the NBN peers whose expertise I deeply admired. And I knew that I didn’t deserve to feel like I was forever radioactive; I wouldn’t give Cartergate that kind of power over me. I wanted to prove, both to Northwestern and to myself, that I was done being ashamed or silenced.

And then: The day arrived. Over a thousand copies of the magazine were handed out all over campus. And it was just like any other day. People told me that they liked the cover, or that they thought the piece was intriguing and thought-provoking. No one threw a parade in my honor, but no one mentioned what had happened the previous spring either.

On one hand, the lesson could be that your personal apocalypses always matter less than you think they do. Very few people still felt the intense rage that had fueled Cartergate. But on the other hand, they do matter, if only to you and your individual growth. I didn’t care what other people thought or if my former critics even knew that the article existed. What mattered was that I was proud of my story, that I had white-knuckled through my self-doubt to see it published, and that I had even channeled that doubt into a tool to improve my work.

Hopefully you’ll never have to face a Cartergate of your own, but at Northwestern, it’s easy for everything—from a difficult final project to radio silence from your crush to even just having to sit through yet another Media Law & Ethics lecture—to seem like a disaster. Sometimes, it might actually be a disaster. But guess what? You’ll survive. Just keep holding on.

That survival might take a little extra self-care, which is important to recognize. But also know that, unless the Polar Vortex comes back to freeze us all, whatever is wrong is not the end of the world. You, and your self-esteem, will recover. For me, my recovery was my refusal to allow others’ opinions to influence me from pursuing my goals. Yours might take a different form. But still: Never quit on yourself.

In the very beginning of Cartergate, I called my parents to ask what they thought of the whole mess. They reassured me that, as a journalist, making people angry was part of the job description. Then my dad offered a Hunter S. Thompson quote, another piece of pretty solid advice that I often return to whenever I feel like giving up.

“When the going gets weird,” he said, “the weird turn pro.”