Anxiety is actually the worst.

There, I said it, and I think that anyone who deals with general anxiety like I do knows what I mean. Anxiety is a scary and confusing thing to deal with sometimes, because for me personally, I can deal with it in many different ways. Even though I was personally never diagnosed with anxiety until I reached middle school, anxiety did affect me as a child. It's a lot to think about how looking back a lot of the ways I dealt with life events were because I was very anxious as a kid. So yeah, I've dealt with anxiety for a very long time, and no it doesn't just go away. Neither does the pain of dealing with it go away either, it just becomes somewhat manageable over time.

Anxiety can honestly feel like many different things depending on the person you are. For me personally though, here's what anxiety feels like.

Imagine yourself in the middle of a deep, dark and cold ocean, and you can't swim so you start to drown but you have absolutely nothing to grab or hold onto. You're literally doing everything you can to stay afloat, but your lungs just keep filling with water which means you can barely breathe and you keep on trying to kick yourself back up to the surface. Anxiety feels like drowning on a full loop, and it never reaching the point where you just let the water take you.

Even though I am not physically drowning, many of the feelings that come from drowning come with anxiety as well. Your chest starts to feel really tight and you have a harder time trying to breathe. Your heart starts pounding uncontrollably to the point where you can feel it slamming against your chest. Sometimes you may be crying uncontrollably or shaking or just feeling like your completely falling apart.

And sometimes anxiety is the opposite. You don't cry or panic uncontrollably, but instead you just live your day to day life. I know it sounds unbelievable, but anxiety doesn't always have to make itself known. I could look like everything is fine on the outside, but on the inside my stomach is in knots and my chest feels tight. No one necessarily needs to look anxious to be anxious, because for me it's become to a point where I'm so good at masking my anxiety. I hate to have to mask it sometimes, but other times I don't necessarily have a choice.

I think the worst thing about having constant anxiety are the thoughts that come with it. I mean, my mind is literally racing all of the time. In fact, I really can't remember a time where I wasn't really thinking about anything. That's what anxiety does to me, it makes me think way too much. Overthinking has become such a big problem of mine, like literally it's too much sometimes. It's hard when you start to feel that everyone hates you for no reason at all or things like suddenly dying at any moment. Even just thinking about my future makes me anxious, and like I said these thoughts are constantly racing through my head. Yes, this makes falling asleep very complicated, since it seems that laying in bed makes me think more for some reason.

And you know what? I really can't control any of this, I really can't. This is one of the big things that most people with anxiety want others to understand. You really can't control when you feel anxious or have a panic attack. It's also not an over reaction either, these are real feelings that we feel, and they hurt and they're scary and were just trying out best to deal with it. Most of us do our best to be strong but it hurts when we feel like our mind is going against us. Anxiety is like an internal battle that we constantly have to fight.

Like I said though, it's totally manageable, especially over time. It's taken me years of trying to find ways to control my anxious thoughts and feelings, but I'm getting better at it over time. Over time I have learned that it can just be the little things in life that ease anxiety for me. Things like taking long walks, watching a movie, cuddling your favorite stuffed animal under the weight of a million blankets, being held in someone's arms, and also talking to God. I can find peace through nature, Disney, the Holy Spirit himself, and more.

On a positive note, without anxiety I don't think I would have ever found my passion for writing, and I wouldn't even be writing this article either. Writing has given me a huge outlet to express how I feel and be able to say the things I could never say out loud. It's given me a creative outlet to express things in my life without having to be so negative and straightforward. In fact, through writing stories and other things I have been able to help myself (and others) understand things like feelings and anxiety more, and that's helped me so much.

So yeah, anxiety is not fun. It's not something I want to have, but it's something that I just gotta deal with. I know that every day I grow stronger to fight the constant war that's going on inside of me.