I first met my anxiety during my freshman year of high school, and unfortunately for me, we’ve been pals ever since. Just like a zit on picture day, my anxiety is always there at the absolute worst moments, ready to turn any situation into a borderline catastrophe. My anxiety is to blame for countless “Actually, I’m gonna stay home!” type of nights, even though I had plans I had been looking forward to for days. I can always feel it coming like it’s about to send me an “omw!” text or something, but the worst part is that I still can’t stop it. It just shows up at my door again for no good reason, and I have no choice but to let it in.
My anxiety and I don’t get along for a number of reasons, one of them being that it’s an awful influence. It makes me procrastinate my school work, lay in bed on my phone for hours, not want to eat properly, and the list goes on. Sometimes I even get anxiety about my anxiety, which is rather inconvenient when you’re trying to do literally anything. For a while, I struggled to try and make sense of the way I was feeling. I have nothing to worry about right now, so why does my body currently feel like it’s in a high-speed chase? It’s like one half of my brain is always cool and collected, but it just has to sit there and watch the other half constantly freak out over everything. It can be frustrating because I know what my anxiety is telling me is illogical, but there’s nothing I can do to shut it up.
So, the fact of the matter is that my anxiety and I are probably going to be not-so-good friends, forever. (NSGFF?). But, if there’s anything I’ve learned after hanging out with it for a while now, it’s that it’s certainly no help to criticize and demean myself for my own feelings. Sometimes, anxiety makes me think of some unrealistic things, but it doesn’t make me any less of a smart and capable person. Sometimes, I still have to cancel plans and just lay in bed because I’m having an anxious day, but that’s perfectly okay. I’m still working on how to deal with it, and maybe one day, I’ll finally kick it to the curb for good. Until then, I’m just going to treat every day as a fresh start and deal with my anxiety as it comes.