When I was a child I was always happy. I was the type of kid who loved to play outside and be with my friends at the time. We would pretend we were spies for some organization or pirates on a fake pirate ship. As I got older, the fun parts of my life slowly started to sneak away and I found myself facing a whole new enemy: Anxiety.
When most people hear the word anxiety, they seem to think it’s not a big deal. Many people believe that when someone has anxiety, all you need to do is just take a few deep breaths and let it pass through your system. But that’s what most people do not understand; they don’t understand what anxiety feels like. In a desire to explain to people how anxiety feels, I’ve decided to share my story.
My anxiety started around the end of my senior year of high school. I had just graduated and was going to be starting the rest of my life. I was going to Penn State, and had the world at my fingertips. I mean, I still do, but after a while, anxious thoughts tried to come back into my life.
As some background info, I was bullied previously in middle school. And when I say bullied, I mean the worst kind. The combination of physical and emotional abuse made me the most unstable I had ever been at the time. I was anorexic, afraid to talk to people, and ashamed of myself. Luckily, high school helped me overcome my anorexia, but as soon as college started, there was a little bit of a return in my problems. This time, it was anxiety.
At first, it was simple. It’s always simple at first. I thought: What if people don’t like how I look? What if I don’t fit in? What if I don’t get along with anyone? These are thoughts everyone has. The breaking point between regular nervous thoughts and true anxiety for me was when I started harming myself because of those anxiety-induced thoughts.
I was born with naturally large hips. These aren’t unattractive as big hips are often desired in mainstream media, but I never thought they were beautiful. Around the fourth of July of 2016 I started beating my hips, hard. I would punch them, as if me bruising and hurting my skin would make them smaller. I broke down to my mom about it when I looked at both of my hips on one night and saw that one was completely black and blue. I could not touch it, or lay down on my stomach at all.
I promised I’d stop doing it after that, but once the bruises healed, the anxiety-induced thoughts came back. I was swarmed with ideas that I’d never be good enough, that I’d never find someone, or that I just wasn’t anything. When these thoughts came back, I started hurting myself again.
I’m almost thankful for those thoughts in the beginning. Because of those, I did meet my boyfriend who I’ve been with for ten months now. God knows he’s helped me through all my crap and I’m surprised he’s still with me even now. I love him because he’s been with me through the best and the worst. If he’s reading this, thank you so much, baby.
After I met my boyfriend, the thoughts went away for a little while. I know this is kind of against the feminist idea that we “don’t need a man” to make ourselves feel good, but it wasn’t just him that helped the thoughts go away. It was the friends I had made and the people I talked to. They didn’t care about how I looked, and for a while, my anxiety disappeared. I didn’t feel the need to hurt myself anymore, and the nervous thoughts returned to something a little more normal.
Then January happened.
About a week into the spring semester, there was literally ice everywhere. Not on some pathways, but on most. When I was getting off the bus to go to my boyfriend’s dorm, I slipped on the ice and broke my arm. And this wasn’t just a clean break. My arm was broken in multiple places. This meant I couldn’t exercise at all for a while.
I’m a very healthy person. My boyfriend would probably fight me on that because of the amount of pizza he’s seen me eat, but that’s really the only unhealthy thing I do consume. And when I do, it’s usually only when I’m out with others. The rest of the time, I’m eating anything that is healthy. Exercising nearly every day was what kept my anxiety away.
When I broke my arm, I couldn’t do anything like that for a long time. I could eat healthy, but getting to and from places to find the food was hard. Exercising was a whole different story. I wasn’t able to go to the gyms as often, and it was a pain to even put my hair up into a ponytail. You do not want to see how bad a ponytail looks when you ask your boyfriend to do it, especially when he’s never touched a girl’s hair in his life.
Because of that, my self-esteem went down dramatically, and then my anxious thoughts came back. This time, the thoughts were focused on my boyfriend. What if he leaves me because I get fat, annoying, or yell at him? These were stupid thoughts to think at the time, because he has told me on multiple occasions that he would love me no matter what. But that’s the thing with anxiety; it makes you believe that what people say isn’t true and that they’re always lying to you. And because of that, I started harming myself again.
This time the harm was physical and emotional. I would snap at my boyfriend for anything, from small to large things, and never be really happy. I would cry nearly everyday, and pull away from people. I then went on some stupid quest to try and lose weight, because my anxiety told me to. This time it wasn’t anorexia, but it was bulimia.
I forced myself to throw up on God knows how many occasions. I felt like I had to do this in order to stay pretty. My boyfriend never knew when I did it, so he couldn’t stop me. I didn’t tell my parents about this until recently. After a while, panic attacks started. I would get shortness of breath out of nowhere. My heart would speed up really fast, and I would get nauseous and dizzy. It would make me want to pass out.
In these attacks, I would cut myself. I thought if I felt pain, the anxiety would go away and assure me I was alive. I now have three scars on my left arm reminding me of that time. I think about it all the time and regret doing what I did. It took three of these attacks for my boyfriend to tell me to go to therapy for my anxiety and for the other things that were going on in my life: for my insecurities, for my bulimia, for everything.
I can gladly say now that doing so has helped me. I’ve felt better lately than I have in the past couple of months, and that’s due to a lot of people. That time in my life was scary. I felt like I really couldn’t break out of that bubble of anxiety. I felt like I’d be trapped in those thoughts forever. Feeling as though you can’t escape those thoughts is one of the scariest parts of anxiety.
I’m not perfect and no one ever will be, but I can openly say I’m better now. I will have relapses. This kind of stuff takes a long time to overcome, but I’m taking one step at a time. There are so many people who deal with the kinds of thoughts I had every single day of our lives, and more action needs to be taken.
I know colleges and health centers across the world are taking more steps towards trying to accommodate mental health issues. My school alone has a therapy service that has a waitlist of it’s own. But there needs to be more options for more people, because some people aren’t as lucky to have people in their life to help them. Anxiety is a real health concern, mentally and physically. People need to really stop saying “it’ll be gone soon enough” because for some, it never really does leave.
Anxiety is a very common concern, but we need to make the treatments common as well. We need mental health to be taken seriously across the world, because treatment can be the one thing preventing someone from seriously harming themselves. To everyone who has suffered from anxiety and know the struggles, I salute you.
If you or anyone else you may know might be suffering from severe anxiety, contact your health advisor. If anyone you know may be experiencing panic attacks, call the panic disorder hotline at 1-800-64-PANIC (2642) for help and to find a possible treatment program.
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