Life: The Pain of Anxiety

Anxiety. I am surrounded by anxiety. I have anxiety and some of my friends have anxiety. It is hard to get away from, but it is also problem that we should not gloss over,  it is something that we need to look at and help those who suffer from the illness.

I have anxiety and I feel like no one else understands how I feel,  no one knows what it is like to suffer from anxious thoughts and panic attacks – well apart from those who suffer from it as well. Anxiety is a pain in the bum! It gets in the way of life and can be very very annoying.

So what is having anxiety like? It’s more than an anxious feeling. It’s more than fear. It is de-habilitating. It’s lonely and it’s painful.  And it can be very hard 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 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 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.

Anxiety is not like this every day, but it is still hard to deal with. How do I cope with it? I take every day at a time, or sometimes one minute at a time. I find that if I start thinking about things in the future I start to panic and anxious. Also I fix my eyes on Jesus, and ask him to help me get through the day.