Having Anxiety Means…

I’ve seen a few memes and such about anxiety, and while some of them make me go “YES! That is what it’s like,” I don’t think some of them really grasp what it is that those with anxiety deal with. It’s more than just an anxious feeling. It’s more than fear. It’s debilitating. It’s painful. And sometimes, it can be downright impossible to “live” with.

• Having anxiety means knowing your fears are unrealistic but being unable to push the thoughts away.
• It means standing in an empty valley but feeling like you can’t breathe.
• It’s having a bad day and having to explain to people it’s not them it’s you.
• It’s feeling totally alone when you are surrounded by people who love you.
• It’s being loved but feeling like it’s only out of pity that people stay.
• It’s remembering every single bad thing you’ve ever experienced and being unable to remember even one good one.
• It’s going back in forth in your head arguing with yourself about why you feel the way you do.
• It’s a cycle of intense emotion followed by being drained of all emotion topped with a migraine to remind you all about what happened hours earlier.
• It’s someone coming to your house/door unannounced and you hiding under a blanket until they leave.
• It’s waking up in the middle of the night feeling like you’re having a heart attack because you can’t remember if you locked your front door.
• It’s being at work and having a full blown panic attack inside but having to hold it together on the outside.
• It’s wanting to curl up and die but at the same time being afraid to.
• It’s having so much emotion that you eventually go numb to save yourself.
• It’s going through a clingy phase after finally starting to feel after hours of being unable to.
• It’s knowing there is a light at the end of the tunnel but being afraid that it’s an oncoming train.
• It’s seeing a wall to climb where everyone else just sees a bump in the road.
• It’s going out at night and wishing every moment you were under your blankets at home.
• It’s wanting to go out but finding an excuse to stay in every time and then beating yourself up for not going out in the first place.
• It’s a sudden burst of fear and you have no idea why.
• It’s a constant battle of worrying when the next battle will come and will you be strong enough to face it and win.

Here’s the important thing though if you are reading this and you have anxiety, you have survived 100% of your bad days. That’s not a bad track record.