I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember. It has periods of ups and downs, but it’s always there. A few months ago I wrote an article about how despite my severe anxiety disorder, I am still a high functioning human. I have a nearly perfect GPA, I’m involved on campus, I’m an athlete, and I have great friends. All that is true, but at the time I wrote that article I was still letting my anxiety win a lot of my daily battles.

As a result, I allowed it to run my life. I was so terrified of failure and so terrified of losing control that everything that used to make me happy made me stressed. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t be anywhere where there was a lot of people.

I was well aware that living in fear of everything under the sun was no way to live, but I believed eliminating stressors from my life was the only way to control my anxiety. Little did I know that every time I “eliminated” something stressful from my life something else would pop up and fill its place.

Finally, after months of digging myself into my own safe hole, I realized that it wasn’t making my anxiety better.

That’s when I decided to face my fears head-on. I needed to confront the things that made me scared in order to show myself that they weren’t actually as terrifying as I built them up to be in my head.

I started small by going to a football game... but not sitting in the students’ section. I started going to the library more instead of blockading myself in my bedroom.

Then I took a leap of faith and did something I never in a million years thought I could do.

The situation actually forced itself upon me. My roommate that I had lived with for 3 years got an internship in a different city and had to move out of our dorm. It was too late for me to request a single dorm, so I had a choice. I could either get a random roommate assigned to my dorm or I could move into the sorority house.

The sorority house did not fit into that loner lifestyle I’d pushed myself into. I would have to live in a room with two other girls. Before, I’d had a suite style dorm so I didn’t actually have to share a bedroom with anyone and my roommate was my best friend, so it didn’t really matter anyway.

My anxiety was at a crossroads. I didn’t know which situation scared me more: the random roommate or the sorority house. Finally, I decided that it was financially more responsible to move into the house because I wouldn’t need to pay for the dorm upgrade overage that wasn’t covered by my scholarship. I chose the sorority house.

I’m glad I did. I’m not the loner I was last semester anymore. I’m starting to feel like I’m turning back into the social butterfly I was before my anxiety took over. My confidence is back and I don’t feel like I need to hide away from the world.

The only way I could free myself from the bonds that my anxiety trapped me in was to deliberately do exactly what my anxiety was telling me not to do.

I could have chosen the random roommate, but I would have spent this entire semester cooped up in my bedroom, too afraid to even go out in the common area and interact with them.

Now I actually willingly hang out in common areas in the sorority house and enjoy talking to my sisters. I definitely still struggle with anxiety every day, but it’s improved DRASTICALLY since November when I wrote my article about it. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and it worked. I’m still definitely struggling with irrational fears, but at least I know that I’ve tackled a major one that was really holding me back.

If you’re struggling with anxiety, push yourself to face it head-on.

You can start small, but eventually, do something in spite of your fear. You will be so grateful once you realize you had nothing to be afraid of after all.