I used to imagine what it would be like to be less anxious. As I would sit against the wall, heart pounding, breath short, mind racing, I would imagine what it would be like if it just stopped. Ended. If I could just switch it off and go back to “normal."

I wondered what it would be like if driving didn’t make me nervous, if every car passing by on the far side of the road didn’t dredge up memories of eye contact across the intersection, realization, impact, twisted metal, smoke, oil, lights and sirens. If I could ride with someone else without snapping at them for not braking quickly enough and then feeling terrible for being such a pest.

I wondered if I could talk to people in general without feeling like a pest.

In the past few months I’ve switched anxiety medications, from one SSRI to another. It’s been an excellent change so far. In some ways, it’s almost working too well: I missed an appointment with my therapist because I wasn’t anxious enough, which is the height of irony. But what I had never imagined until it was gone was that, in some ways, I needed my anxiety.

I missed that appointment because the burrowing dread of missing an appointment was gone. I didn’t double check the time because I thought I knew what time it was at, and for once I didn’t second-guess myself. I thought about looking it up the night before, but I was tired (at a normal time of night! I didn’t stay up until two in the morning worrying about something that happened in middle school!) and just wanted to get to sleep.

So I showed up three hours late. It was obnoxious, and I wished it hadn’t happened— but the world didn’t end, I rescheduled, and was even lucky enough to get in another appointment when someone else cancelled. Life went on, in a way that I couldn’t have believed six months ago.

I mention that the world didn’t end for one missed appointment because I want to be clear: just because my anxiety used to help me function sometimes, that doesn’t mean I want it back. And I certainly don’t want to come off as complaining about having it under control when I know exactly what it used to feel like, when I remember being willing to give up anything to worry less, panic less and pester less.

When you live with anxiety, every tiny misstep feels like an awful calamity. Whether it’s showing up late to an appointment, or feeling like you must have said something careless when talking to a new friend, anxiety makes you add up your mistakes during the day and tally them up at night trying to figure out just how awful a person you must be, on a scale that only goes from “unbearable idiot” to “colossal waste of space."

And the cruel reality of the world we live in today is that anxious habits are encouraged and even rewarded. Our society (or at least the parts of it I move in) rewards fastidiousness, incentivizes doubt and demands perfection— so it is little wonder we have an epidemic of neurotic self-doubting perfectionists. Living in the Midwest certainly doesn’t help, where our every interaction glistens with a veneer of politeness, gossip drifts like snow to pile up behind your back, and your best friends are the people you trust to actually tell you—and not always politely—when you’re being insufferable.

The result is that being anxious is normal, and being extremely anxious is often invisible, particularly because revealing your own anxiety is another forbidden misstep in the minefield anxiety makes you navigate daily.

So I have needed my anxiety, with exactly the kind of need that ugly codependence is made of. And now that I am free of it, I find myself needing to rebuild my habits and learn to manage myself in a new, kinder way. It is a problem I feel lucky to have. If I hadn’t found a medication that worked so well for it, I would need to be finding these habits while still ruled by anxious behavior.

But I think it must be crucial that I do; it may even help me hold on should the anxiety return. And I think it must be crucial for my fellow anxiety sufferers, who I hope have borne with me while I complained about how awesome my life is now that the gloom of worry is lifted.

And I’ll say this; if I am a success story, it is only because I had access to important resources: time with a counselor, the financial means to afford medication. There are many, many talented people in my position unable to live fully who don’t have access to these same resources. If there really is to be a national conversation about mental health, it needs to start with the availability of those resources to anyone who needs them, regardless of circumstance.