Fighting with a friend is hard. You want it to be over. You wish that everything could go back to the way it was before. Fighting with something inside of your mind is even harder, but it's basically the same. I have dealt with anxiety for as long as I can remember. Just recently, I’ve started getting treatment for it. It’s been an uphill battle the whole way. Anxiety is hard. Getting treatment is hard. Sometimes it’s easier to stop fighting, to let the anxiety take over, but I can’t. I won’t do that to myself.

Have you ever leaned back in a chair and started falling? You panicked for a minute, and then most likely caught yourself. Have you ever actually fallen back on the floor? Probably not, or at least not very often. That is what anxiety feels like - that little bit of time between realizing you might fall and catching yourself. You know that nine times out of ten you’ll be okay, but that knowledge doesn’t change the fact that you’re really scared in the moment. You're stuck in that moment, and you can only think about that one occurrence when you didn’t catch yourself in time.

I get anxious about all sorts of different things. Sometimes I know what I'm anxious about and sometimes I don't. I can be anxious about anything from a presentation in class, which makes sense to most people, to walking down my hall when there are people outside of their rooms. I know, that one seems weird. It probably doesn't make sense, and that's okay. My mental illness doesn't usually make sense to the people around me. That's been one hard thing to deal with over the years. I'm expected to just relax. It isn't that easy. I'm sure that anyone with any mental illness would agree with that. This is why it's hard to tell the world how we feel. It's scary. You never know how someone is going to react.

Getting treatment was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but it was one of the most rewarding. It’s always been hard for me to ask for validation, but this was a whole different thing. I was going to a doctor’s office and asking them to deem me, “anxious enough,” to deserve medication. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to be. I was scared of that label. As soon as I got medication, an anxiety disorder would permanently be on my file. Looking back, it was one of the best things I could have done for myself. As hard as it was to do, it was one of the most important things in my recovery process. That validation has made such a difference in my life.

Mental illnesses are hard to deal with. Of course, I could never truly understand how it feels for other people dealing with anxiety, but I know without a doubt that it isn’t easy. If you’re fighting a mental illness silently, please get help. I know how big of a step that is to take, but it’s so worth it in the end. Trust me.