What Is Anxiety Like?

 Anxiety can be a complicated thing to understand if you have never quite experienced it, this post will explain a little about what anxiety means to me, it might be a bit dark but I've been a bit down and felt like writing and expressing this. Anxiety is unique and at times hard to empathize with or fully understand if you have never had a severe anxious period in your life, though we all do in different forms, such as public speaking, job interviews, uncertain life events, and problems. The only difference with people with diagnosed anxiety disorders is that it can be constant, daily, for months, years or their whole life. And how severely it can interfere with their entire life, school, work, money, friends, family, life quality, health and so on.

People with severe anxiety can feel as if they are drowning as if the whole world continues on without them while they stop. It's not being able to experience the things you want to do in life, because you are severely scared, afraid and have lots of fears, doubting yourself as a person and your life as a whole. It's incredibly puzzling as it is scary and depressing. No one knows what you think constantly every day and how those thoughts can break you. When you question if you can go on sometimes, when you question if you are just too weak, too stupid, too fragile, or just not meant for this life. Why can everyone else manage when you can barely surface on the water, can barely hold things together. When you can't breathe sometimes from crying too hard or from having anxiety and panic attacks, when you want to harm yourself or do stuff that you feel might end the pain because of that intense feeling of being trapped in your own body, being trapped in your own mind, telling you lies, telling you aren't worth anything or that your worries about every little thing and catastrophizing about the slightest things, define you, that you have nothing else but doubt, fear, limits.

You are not good enough, you will never be good enough. These barriers that are horrible to say to anyone and more so to say to yourself. Whom you should be kindest to.

And you keep it all inside, everyone else might think you are weak or might not know what you're going through at all. Like it's a deep dark secret. Like you are the only one dealing with this battle constantly, you feel hopeless. Your whole life is questioning yourself, questioning your abilities, your worth, your experiences and all your failures, questioning how you can go on in life or why you were made this way.
As if you are numb to the entire world, and you don't feel anything but also feel everything at the same time.

You're FAT, You're UGLY, you are a horrible person, you will never amount to anything in life.

Now imagine living with these thoughts and many more super situation-specific ones, phobias, or things keeping you from living the life you want. Afraid of college, afraid of driving, afraid of failing in life, of always being unstable, and afraid of never getting better. Afraid of yourself. Afraid of the horrible things you say to yourself and how you define you/ what image you have of yourself, and how that reflects your flaws, capabilities and so on.
Of feeling like you give up too easily, and get too easily discouraged.

Worrying about the future, present or past. Being stuck in any of these in a bad way.


Now forgive me for sounding too negative. But I think it's important to also show the cruel reality of what it is to suffer from a disease like this because mental diseases/illnesses are just as real as physical ones. Because your mind determines and controls your life. 

Anxiety can be being socially anxious, worried about what people think about you, uncomfortable in big or small crowds depending, etc, comparing yourself to others.

Anxiety is...
Feeling like you're too sensitive to everyone and to the whole world. Feeling stuck in life and unable to move forward. It can be general Anxiety, anxious about many things in life. Anxiety can be having specific phobias about things that could happen or have happened to you before that you fear of it happening again, of post-traumatic events that can be a struggle to cope with in the way they affected you, the severity/ damage it could be for anyone to go through difficult trauma, and how you can move forward after that, what sticks with you, and what you can get help with to try to cope more. Obsessive-compulsive anxiety when you feel you have to do rituals or certain things a specific way to feel control or cope, or fear of what could happen if you don't do these things repetitively. Panic attacks and anxiety attacks disorder where you have severe heavy breakdowns, hyperventilating, and intense feelings and thoughts as if there's no escape or sometimes feels almost like a heart attack where you can get chest pains and severe symptoms physically, headaches, migraines, rapid breathing, for some fainting or other symptoms. Separation anxiety, being separated from someone you love, a family member a boyfriend or girlfriend, friend, or most commonly separation anxiety for children from their parents.


Anxiety can start from being learned from a parent, worrying a lot about everything or being negative or hopeless, having low self-esteem or perhaps multiple illnesses combined with depression or other mental health illnesses. It can be more prone from genetics, or a result of a troubled extreme unstable childhood that could have caused fear in the place you are supposed to feel most safe, with family, at a home thats supposed to feel like home and your safe space. It can occur early in life through difficult incredibly challenging life experiences, losing someone, experiencing war, unpredictable events, or even later in life either randomly through small events or big life events alike or just out of nowhere. Maybe balancing life, or having kids and being too worried about them and the implications or motherhood or fatherhood, to be good enough. Post-partum depression or anxiety, or other symptoms for different diagnosis during and/or after pregnancy. Being too much on social media and comparing yourself to others and thinking you're not good enough. Anxiety comes in all different ways.

And even though I don't think like this much anymore ( my above personal experience with anxiety) due to reaching out for professional counseling help. Struggling for a long time to wind up finding things that help me cope and feel better, I can say though I still struggle every day, it's nowhere near as bad as it was for a period for years.

And no matter how hopeless this disease is for anyone who struggles with it, you are worth so much and are worthy of living a good life, no matter how unlikely that may seem for sufferers.

So please try to work on it because you are all beautiful humans that deserve love, love from yourself, love from everyone.
You aren't weak, you have just been strong for too long, and your scars, your secret mind battles, and experiences show that.

I would say the most rewarding thing of struggling with this disease is to help others who struggle with it, once you have felt you feel a bit happier and healthier or feel you have reached out for help and gotten to learn more of tools that help you the most. We all have our bad days, this just happened to be one of my bad days that reminded me of all of this and so I wanted to share to relate to other sufferers and to share the growth within it, despite how hard it can be, and how real those barriers can feel.
I wish you all the best and wish you all the best in life <3. Please take care of yourself as much as you can, because no human deserves to live in misery all alone with no help.
I wish you all an incredible journey, because it is so so tough, but so worth it when you can finally get to a place of peace and reflect on all that inner turmoil, how it has made you grow, or what you've learned from it; the good and the bad, and how you can be compassionate and help other people who have been in the same spot you have been and to save them, help them, guide them or be a friend to them.

I don't know quite how to end this, but I wish I could be there in person to tell you that "I get it", you don't have to be scared or misunderstood, lonely or hopeless, I've been there and the going is tough but it gets better, you just have to hang in there as much as you can because there is still so much of this world so much beauty to compensate for all the ugly. All the beauty of the world you have yet to see and discover. 
So please never give up on that possibility.
Give yourself that chance after all that you have gone through or are currently going through, it's the least you deserve and more.

I wish I could be there in person to tell you everything is going to be okay, and you will get through it, you will survive this hardship, and are more than equipped to deal with all that life throws at you, to hug you while you cry it out. But as I, unfortunately, can't do that, I hope that you can see through my words, and know you are not ALONE, you are loved, you are special, you have so much potential, you are smart, beautiful, strong, and should forgive yourself for all the mistakes or failures we like to focus on, and instead see how you have grown, and all the good you have done, not just the bad.

I hope to see you strong and become a WARRIOR, not a worrier <3

Here is to a greater life, we can build together. Take care and I'm here for anyone if they need it, at any time and any day.





~Love Laura

P.S. Sorry I started out so negative but I wanted to fully describe what it can be like to have anxiety.
:) <3 just my personal experience, but everyone experiences it differently and that's okay.




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