It’s common now to hear someone say, “Ugh, my anxiety was so bad,” when talking about something that happened to them. Even ten years ago, this wasn’t something people could say openly, but the frequency in recent years has its negative side.
My anxiety disorder seriously harms the way I live my life. Before people started realizing it was insensitive, it was also common to say “I’m so OCD.” I still hear this in public sometimes, but not as much as I used to. It seems like a societal pattern – to go from one insensitive phrase to another, never learning from our mistakes. Nevertheless, it’s important to talk about mental illness and mental health and what that means for the people suffering.
I started college a month ago, and before that point, my anxiety kept me in the house most of the time, quiet when talking to strangers, and nervous at the thought of any upcoming event. Life had a basic routine, which was fine with me. When you neglect your anxiety, you let it grow, even though you’d like to believe it’ll just fade away when you ignore it.
When I thought about college, or when people asked me how I felt about it – the dreaded question most incoming freshmen probably don’t know how to answer – I ignored my feelings about college like I ignored my anxiety. Maybe it would be good, maybe it would be bad, but I’d manage. This is what I told myself.
I wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t being delusional – I was just avoiding thinking about it. My senior year of high school had overwhelmed me to the point where my grades dropped at the very end of the year. After 10 months of people pushing college decisions on me and making sure I’d “do my best in school for college,” I didn’t have much left to work with. I wanted school to be over. I couldn’t even think about college, which I applied to last minute.
My seven roommates contacted me towards the end of summer and started discussing what we would bring to the dorm. I didn’t reply to the majority of messages, telling myself I’d figure it all out when the time came and that I shouldn’t worry about it yet, because it was still July.
This isn’t an entirely horrible coping method. It just goes to show what having anxiety is like for people who don’t have it. Ideally, it would be nice to plan ahead for college, but having anxiety turns stress into stress times ten. The only option that I felt was good for me was not getting stressed in the first place.
On move-in day, I managed to keep calm until the car was parked and I had to get out and start unpacking. Time frames, crowds of people, and various interactions were already on my mind. I’d rather have just stayed in the car and driven off, regardless of how much people claim they loved college. “It’s an amazing experience, you’ll love it!” was what I had heard since childhood, but I wasn’t buying it. No one with anxiety told me I’d love college, so why should I believe the people who rarely feel that anxiety bubbling up in their stomach?
Not only does anxiety make me stressed, but it also makes me believe everyone I talk to is thinking something bad about me. I asked for the key to my room and I forgot the number I had been told just 10 seconds prior, my anxiety creating barricades in my brain. As the person helping look for my room number searched for a minute, I felt like everyone was looking at me, that I was being annoying because I made them look for it. In reality, I was just one of the hundreds of people that would stop at that table that day, and most of the people there probably wouldn’t even recognize me after that day. But anxiety makes you believe something else. Even typing that, I can’t convince myself that no one remembered me looking “awkward.”
The rest of move-in day felt exactly like that, with lots of eyes on me and dozens of people to talk to, if only in a small interaction. It was full of ice breakers and people enthusiastically telling me a list of all the things to do in the first week, including “get to know your professors,” or “make friends,” two things most people with anxiety understand as unrealistic goals. College, like high school, is made for one type of person – someone who doesn’t mind talking to people. Over the past month, because of my new environment, I had to adapt with my anxiety, like an animal species adapting to a new landscape with new food sources.
It was no longer an option to not make myself get out of the house. Without someone else to buy me groceries, I had to walk out of my room, out of my building, down the street, and into Publix. Others with anxiety might disagree and say the need for food couldn’t even pull them out of their anxiety – everyone is different. For me, I’ve probably interacted with more people in the last month than I did since the beginning of this year.
But is this a good thing or a bad thing? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is used for people with anxiety to push them into the situations that cause the anxiety. Of course, this sounds terrifying, but at some point, the anxiety becomes too much. Often when you hit rock bottom, or something similar, you have to do something other than what you’ve been doing. So, being in college has helped my anxiety, but just as it makes the “highs” high, it makes the “lows” even lower. Sometimes, I do just want to stay inside, and it’s harder for me to do that on my campus.
Anxiety is a lifelong struggle. As an 18-year-old, this is probably ridiculous to say, but for the past few years of my life, I’ve never really had a reprieve from anxiety. Even if you’re extremely happy, you can have little moments of anxiety throughout the day – talking to a stranger, doing something outside of your comfort zone to get a little bit of happiness for yourself. Or you can have anxiety in the back of your mind just waiting for the best time to creep in.