A Battle with Myself: Anxiety

A Battle with Myself: Anxiety

For some reason anxiety is passed off as just an emotion. Whereas depressed is often classified an emotion too, it is more widely regarded as a mental illness.

So why isn’t anxiety?  Anxiety and depression are two mental health issues which seemingly go with each other hand in hand – so why is Anxiety the more overlooked problem? Labelled as a passing farce, just something that everyone feels once in a while, nobody really takes into credit just how bad Anxiety is.

Until you yourself experience it. Get put into counselling for it. Get through counselling, feeling on top of the world – then realising you’re getting dragged back into that dank hole where the simplest things are made virtually impossible.

You’re trapped in your house you feel sick about leaving. Your social lives crumble; seeing people, going places, it becomes too much. The feeling of sickness sets in hours before you have plans – food is impossible to eat in the duration since you’re 100% sure you’re going to spew everywhere – followed by short shallow breathing, the tightening of your throat, the tears followed by the penultimate shaking.

And then you’re having a panic attack. All because you’re going to an 18^th birthday party with people you’ve known nearly all your life.

You’re an emotional wreck, forever tearful, forever tired. An unspoken trait of Anxiety is the imagining of horrible things happening to loved ones, people you care about.

And after these imaginings you’re left wondering just how sick you truly are for thinking such things.

You’re sat there having dinner at a restaurant, calm, happy, then all of a sudden you’re shaking, you’re feeling dazed and dizzy and you need to leave, you need to get out of there before something bad happens because it will. It’s pleading to leave just to get back to your home you know you never should have left in the first place. It’s the frustration and self-loathing you feel for letting that other person down.

Throughout each and every day you’re always worried. Those little issues that someone else doesn’t pay attention to niggles you for hours. You ask the same thing over and over, seeking that comfort and whatever words you need to put you at ease about the situation, but they’re never there. It’s never what you want to hear. Its people telling you “stop worrying” “stop going on about it” “you’re being stupid.”

Saying these things don’t help. They don’t make you feel any better.

They make you feel embarrassed.

Following constant embarrassment is low self-esteem. It’s confidence at an all new low. It’s looking at the floor when you walk, crying into your pillow after a fleeting glance in the mirror, it’s the praying that you had different, better qualities.

“I wish I had bigger boobs” “I wish I wasn’t this fat” “I wish my nose was smaller” “I wish my chin wasn’t so big.”

Everything’s a fault. There’s never a good thing to say about you.

It’s knowing that deep down you’re not good enough. And you probably never will be.

Compliments, they get ignored. Criticism is accepted. That low confidence means you’re more responsive to negativity than positivity.

I can go on and on about what anxiety feels like. It’s not a small stigmatism of feeling a little scared and nervous about starting a new job, leaving home, going on holiday abroad for the first time etc.

It’s something you’ve got to live with every day. It’s something that plays on you and affects you more than people realise.

Even if you don’t understand all of this, even if you don’t find it relatable, please appreciate the bravery of us anxiety sufferers. Going out for you? Easy. Going out for us?

Hours of mental and physical suffering. It’s building up that bravery, getting through the tears, holding yourself strong through the shaking, biting your tongue down against the lump in your throat, trying to control your breathing even though it is refusing to be anything but erratic just so that panic attack is pushed away. It’s having to defend yourself against even your close friends and family who just don’t understand why you’re feeling like this.

More often than not you don’t understand yourself.

I can talk more and more about the barrier between anxiety suffers and non-anxiety suffers, but hopefully you’re getting the gist of how bad things can be.

For everyone reading this post, please realise that anxiety is a mental health issue. It is a horrible thing. And it’s something that needs addressing on a wider scale, the same with other mental health issues out there. Just because it’s not physical doesn’t mean it’s not an illness. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean that it can’t be ignored.