The thing people have to understand about anxiety is – it’s a form of pain. It’s emotional pain and it is just as real and just as detrimental as physical pain, except that it’s harder to treat and it often lasts longer. It’s one of those things that you can so easily fall into and never climb out of. It traps you, it isolates you and people don’t understand it. They try, but they get frustrated or hurt when they don’t seem to make a difference after a while. For some reason, physical pain is far more accepted by other people because there’s often evidence of it that they can physically see, like a wound or a scar. Emotional pain is too often looked upon as self-indulgent or just a plain old negative attitude.

I wish it was something people could see so they could understand it better. It would be so much easier if that heaviness you felt was a physical thing, like literal baggage you had to carry around with you instead of just the emotional kind. Because if it was something sizable that physically weighed you down, people could understand why it’s so hard to get out of bed in the morning. It would be so much easier if sadness caused your face to dry out and go brittle, just so it would crack and bleed whenever you smiled. Perhaps then people would see how much it hurts when everyone else around you laughs and smiles and you feel you have to as well so you can fit in. Or perhaps if anxiety caused your eyesight to darken, and happiness was a blinding light that burnt your eyes if you suffered from it, people would understand why we so often look away or avoid happy people altogether. But it’s one of those things nobody can see and you can never put into words for anybody else to understand but you – and that is precisely why it is so isolating.

Sometimes the most helpful and understanding thing somebody can do for you is simply accept that you suffer from something they can’t understand, and not expect more than you’re capable of. I know that without physical evidence, deep nervousness is difficult to understand, but acceptance is just as helpful. To know that how you’re feeling is accepted by somebody – even if they don’t understand it – takes away that constant pressure to pretend to be how you think people want you to be so you can focus your energy into healing at your own pace.