All my life I have struggled with anxiety, but I never knew what it was that I was suffering from. My first memories of feeling afraid of going to school were in Year 3 – I felt sick all the time, and I persuaded my parents for almost 2 months to take me out of school. There seemed to be no explanation – I was so young that it seemed ridiculous that anything could be causing me to be that anxious.
I used to think that I was just shy, but as I moved on from primary school to secondary school everything became worse. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me – there seemed to be no reason for why I would dread going to school every morning. I had migraines almost every month. Rationally, there was nothing for me to be anxious about – I had a happy home, loads of friends, was an incredibly good student and was, for the most part, a happy and confident person, yet I was spending every day drinking litres and litres of water and skipping lunch because I was too anxious to eat anything, and felt nauseated all the time. I went to the doctor because I kept feeling off balance – it was as if the whole world was turning, yet I was standing still and couldn’t quite keep up. Sitting in the assembly hall made me feel like I was about to die; I couldn’t help but have a panic attack every single Thursday.
In Year 9, my dad became incredibly ill. He was in hospital for over three months, had open-heart surgery and a stroke whilst I completed my first GCSE. Looking back at these moments, I find it hard to believe I even made it through, but the incredible thing was (in a moment of stress that should’ve been debilitating) I felt absolutely nothing. No anxiety, no constant nausea or panic attacks… nothing. My stress and anxiety seemed to come only from fear for myself.
By Year 11, I could recognise that something was definitely wrong. I had lost my group of best friends, distancing myself from them because all they wanted to do was go out to parties and get drunk, but my anxiety wouldn’t even let me leave my house without worrying that something was going to wrong. I was breaking down into tears every week over my Art GCSE, because I felt like everything I created was shit despite all my best efforts. I barely ate, and now that I see myself in my prom photos I’m shocked at how thin I had become. But eventually, I started to do something about it.
I went to my doctor and got referred to FirstSteps for mental health therapy. I applied to do my exams in a separate room, removing the possibly of having a panic attack in the middle of an exam and being unable to finish it. By the end of the summer of Year 11, I only felt anxious in a large crowd that I was unable to escape. However, anxiety reared its ugly head again last year in my final year of A-Levels, mounting with the pressure of getting into university. It took severe tolls on my health again, which was particularly hard because it wasn’t visible from the outside. Everything was happening from the inside out. Nobody (who I hadn’t told about how I felt) could ever have guessed what was happening to me.
Now I’m in my first year of university, and things have been difficult. As someone who suffers from anxiety, change is never helpful, and for weeks and weeks before I moved to Bristol I would keep myself up at night wondering about what university would be like. What I find most difficult now are lectures – if I don’t sit in the right place where I will be able to leave if I begin panicking, I can’t concentrate on anything the lecturer says because I am too consumed with fear. Still, I get better at little things every day.
What World Mental Health Day means to me is the possibility that one day I won’t feel like this. One day, I’ll be able to sit anywhere in a room and not worry about where the exits are. I’ll be able to get in a lift without freaking out, and begin to not care about what others think of me. I’ll be confident in my friendships and not worry about if people like me or for me, or get jealous and crazy when I think about my boyfriend leaving me for someone ‘better.’ World Mental Health Day, to me, will always mean progress, and hopefully, that means I’ll keep making it.