Anxiety Is Real: Why Your Emotions Are Valid

There is strength in weakness, sturdiness in fragility.

These words sound poetic and to some can thereby sound empty, but I promise you they are void of nothing.

As I've wrestled with the anxiety beast for a while now, I've started to notice it's less obvious tendencies. Peel away the obvious, strip away the outer layer of physicality. Remove from your mind the obvious jitters, the shallow breathing, the dry mouth and wobbly knees. Forget about the quaking butterflies in your stomach and study your psyche and I'm sure you'll find something not too dissimilar from this.

Anxiety leaves you feeling really damn small.

Now, there is a beauty in feeling small. Maybe you've stood by the beach as powerful waves rolled in, or perhaps you've flown on a plane and observed massive buildings shape shift to specks as you ascend higher and higher. Beauty is the ever-present awareness, as you gaze into a sea of stars, that you are hardly representative of anything at all; you are one person, from one family, from one home, from one town, from one county, from one state, from one country, from your miniscule world, and your world is connected with an unknown, vast amount of other worlds, which may contain one similar being cognizant of the exact same pieces of existence that you are. Beauty is the realization that your perspective is nothing, essentially. It does not mattter. It is a drop in the bucket. It just simply means so little, which isn't to say that you should disrespect or undermine your own power, but it certainly serves to teach that the only real emotion worthy of your time is happiness; nothing else matters.

All of these aforementioned experiences serve to relieve us, as they empty our mind of petty worries, and remind us that life’s everyday struggles amount to nothing in the grand scheme of it all.

Reflecting on this, I've really started to wonder: why can't anxiety’s smallness and the beautiful smallness be one in the same?

I become increasingly aware of the smallness effect if ever I'm involved in any sort of confrontation. I can feel myself physically and emotionally shrink. I recoil as if I've been hit. Words start to blur together into one roaring sound, as I realize afterwards I can't even recall the specifics of anything that was said. I feel powerless. I feel embarrassed at my length of bigness and strength, qualities we Westerners pride ourselves on so deeply.

Realize that there is no shame in this. Your gentle soul is akin with mine. We may be easily bruised, but that doesn't say anything about our character. After all, the most coveted things in the world are those that are the most beautiful, and only in the smallness is there any beauty.