Up until the eighth grade, I led a pretty normal life. Sure, I was worried about things and had experienced stress, but nothing like what hit me at thirteen years old. Eighth-grade me began to worry about things that didn’t even fully make sense. I blew the smallest things out of proportion. I cried almost every day and began to worry about things that were out of my control. As I progressed through high school, everything only got worse. The stress I had felt before became full-blown anxiety and I didn’t know how to deal with it on my own. Nevertheless, I kept my feelings hidden, fearful that people would think less of me. It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year of high school that I let my secret slip to my mom and she discovered how much I truly had been hiding.
Taking your driver’s test is generally a stressful event, but it became the thing that showed my mom how much anxiety I had kept pent up for so long. Upon arrival at the testing site, my mom and I drove around three times, just so I could calm myself down enough to start the test. I was crying and laughing at the same time and I didn’t understand why. I forced myself to be out of breath because I was hyperventilating and I was rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat screaming. Up until this point, my mom had understood that something was going on, but didn’t understand the extent to which it had control over me. I am thankful for this moment because I could finally share what I had been hiding for so long with my best friend and I didn’t have to work to keep it a secret from her anymore.
From that point on, my anxiety only got worse and has continued to today (granted I’m not actively doing anything to make it better, but still). I have phone anxiety, I get anxious when I have to write papers, and any time a deadline comes up, I have an anxiety attack until it passes. Sometimes I can calm down on my own, but often I cannot and rely on the help of others. I am open about the fact that I have anxiety and it is easy to see on the surface that I do, but the inner workings of my anxiety are quite private. Only the people that I am very close with see me during an anxiety attack and those are also the people I can talk to that will understand what I am saying. Everyone else gets just the basic, “Oh I have anxiety about this thing.” I hide it from them in an effort to seem more normal, calmer than I really am. The people I hide it from the most are professors and supervisors because they are the ones evaluating my work and I don’t want my anxiety to stand in the way of that or have an influence on their vision of me. Anxiety has been a part of who I am for a long time and it will continue to be for a long time. How I come to terms with it, has yet to be determined.