You wake up practically every morning with it. It consumes your entire life. No, it’s not your favorite television show. It’s that dark cloud hanging over you called anxiety. Having anxiety, at any point in life, is a terrifying and scary concept. Having anxiety during your college years probably makes it 10 times worse. You are beginning this new chapter in your life and are about to embark on a journey into adulthood. You are expected to be responsible and probably for the first time in life, be on your own. You are expected to be on your own during a time when your anxiety is at an all-time high, and the last thing you need is to feel alone.
When you begin your college journey, you’re faced with so much change. Most people choose a school more than an hour away from home, if not completely out of state. When you are far away from home, no matter how long the distance, it can take a toll on your emotions. You grew up in one environment with the same group of people practically your entire life and now you have to start all over. These feelings of homesickness are some of the worst days of college, if it’s not already a daily occurrence. How are you supposed to live and enjoy your life if you don’t feel at home? When it isn’t homesickness that is causing your attacks, it’s the pressure of being accepted. During your first year, you are thrown into a diverse campus with so many different groups of people. When you have anxiety, you constantly question your identity and form an extremely low self-esteem because of this. When you combine this aspect of it with being surrounded by so many different and new personalities, you begin to lose yourself. You always feel the need to fit in and try extra hard to do so. Even the smallest topic of conversation, you feel the need to jump into because the thought of being excluded from anything scares the living hell out of you. When it comes to your friends that you’ve made while in college, man, anxiety, back at it again with the self-esteem issues.
Although your friends are your friends, you constantly fear that something you do or say will turn them away. You basically have anxiety attacks over whether they actually like you and if they’re going to bond with other friends more than you. I know, silly right? But this is what anxiety does, it strips down every quality that makes you, you and makes you see the negative in every situation. It takes the smallest part of your day, that will probably be irrelevant in an hour, and turns it into the biggest problem you have ever faced. Even waking up in the morning, you think about whether eating those eggs for breakfast was a good idea to the point where it takes over your mind for the entire day. Simply having this anxiety leads to anxiety about having anxiety and so on and so forth. It seems never-ending and so overbearingly scary that you just want to give up. You just want to crawl into bed and shut the world out. I know because I struggle with this every single day, but I’m going to tell you something that I probably need to start telling myself. You are not the only one, and it is going to get better.
No matter how low and alone you feel, you aren’t. There are so many people you are surrounded by that would want nothing more than to help you, support you and accept you for who you are. The scariest thing in the world can be to admit you have anxiety. You don’t want to seem "crazy" and feel misunderstood by others. I promise you, talking to someone about it will be the best decision you ever made. You will see everything in a whole new light and maybe even form a new perspective on life. There is no shame in going to see a professional that can help you and steer you in the right direction. You should never have to resort to crying your eyes out in your room all day because your anxiety is peaking. You can learn techniques to help you through those difficult times. You can realize that embracing and coping with your anxiety is a realistic goal. Every aspect of college, even life in general, is stressful and terrifying. I know that anxiety amplifies all of this, but giving up is never the answer. When you feel like your life is just one giant black whole and everything seems pointless, know that it isn’t. You have support, love, and loyalty from others, and you have yourself. Find the strength within yourself to overcome it all. Love yourself, and love your anxiety, because it’s what make you, you.
