Dear Anxiety,
I was nine the first time I realized you had been a major part of my life. It started with the girls who bullied me. You remember the ones that made you my only friend. You kept me away from school, and away from sleep. It was just you and I in my fourth grade classroom. I remember not understanding why you caused a pain in my chest when I thought about returning to school the next day. I remember how you used to talk me into getting out of school as often as possible so I would only have to endure your torment and not theirs.
You didn’t really ever leave after that. Even when they stopped picking on me there was a part of me that was attached to your acquaintance. The first panic attack I remember was right before I was about to leave for a trip out of the country without my parents. My mother soothed me on the couch while I tried to start breathing regularly. It felt like I was going to vomit. You did this to me and you knew it.
You followed me into junior high, and high school. You were like my first boyfriend. Something that was bad for me, but somehow I could never let go of. Unlike him, I can’t get rid of you. You have seen, and brought me to, my lowest lows. For the last twelve years you have stuck to me like a tendon connects muscle to bone. I cannot let you go even though I want to. This is not by choice, and you know that. You know that no matter how much I work on limiting your presence just one slip causes you to come back full force.
No one ever understands what it’s like to live with you. What it is like to wake up and over think every action I take. No one knows that I fixate on tiny conversations from days before wondering if I could have said something better or less awkward. No one knows that you convince me into thinking the world is against me when really you are just against the world. You sit there and beg me to overthink my every move. You beg and I almost always give in.
Anxiety you have tried to keep me from living. I can’t go anywhere without you. You are at my side: In the grocery store with the overwhelming cashier, doctors’ offices, table 44 with the angry man and his two sons, any family get together, and even in my sleep.
You have inserted yourself into every aspect of my life, and it’s time people understand that you are more than just a “thing in my head.” So many people have said you are just in my head. While they are right as you are a mental disorder. Living with you is more than mind over matter. You are not something that I can get rid of, and we both know that. I am trying to stop being embarrassed by you. You know as well as I do that no matter what I have to live with you. I am still trying to allow myself to accept that you are a part of me.
Sincerely, it’s more than mind over matter.
