Friday, March 1, 2019

A Personal Struggle with Anxiety

     For as long as I can remember, I have been a very anxious person. When I was young, I experienced anxiety as soon as I had to leave my parents to go to school each day. I was overly nervous every day at school for no apparent reason. This continued on throughout all my years of school and throughout my life in general. I started having panic attacks in tenth grade, and I felt anxiety with every aspect of my life. As I have gotten older, I have learned how to handle my anxiety; I don't feel as crippled by it anymore. There are still times when everything seems to be going fine and then out of nowhere, the anxiety is back in control. I experienced situations where people around me didn't believe me or didn't understand what I was feeling, so they disregarded me. I had to learn for myself that it doesn't matter what other people think in life, truly. I had to decide for myself that I wanted to make changes in order to be happy. 
     One of the first things I did was research as much as I could about anxiety to better understand myself. I learned that breathing is a huge part of calming yourself down, as simple as it sounds. I actually have the words "just keep breathin" tattooed on my arm as a reminder that I can look down and see at any given moment. I was against taking any type of medicine my entire life, but by my senior year of high school, I was desperate and I didn't know what else to do. I talked to my doctor, and she prescribed me something that would help. I definitely would not say that the medicine has magically cured anything. It does help a little bit, but honestly, I think the main thing that has helped me is really understanding myself and giving myself more of a break in life. I can be very hard on myself, so I had to learn to be nicer to myself and work on letting go of things in life that I cannot control. Another thing that has really helped has been finding things that I love that I can turn to that give me a temporary break from reality. I am still working on my anxiety each day; it isn't gone and probably never will be, but at least now it is much more manageable. 

3 comments:

  1. it was cool that you researched it to help yourself. Sometimes you need to sit down and breathe to calm yourself down, I get that

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  2. I think it's really awesome that you chose to write about your struggles with anxiety. You did a great job reflecting on how you've grown stronger and how you continue to work on managing it. It's also super creative to get a tattoo as a constant reminder to help keep you calm. The only advice that I have would be possibly adding a little more detail to really narrow down on how this anxiety made and still makes you feel in the past and present, especially for those who do not experience anxiety so that they can get a better understanding.

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  3. Simply put, as someone with anxiety: I get it.

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