Anxiety isn't just being nervous about a test or feeling overwhelmed with school. It's not just "Oh man, I have so much anxiety about asking this boy out." People these days are mixing up normal nerves and actual anxiety disorders. Anxiety can cripple your ability to function in your daily life. As someone that was diagnosed with anxiety at a very young age, I know the daily struggles it brings and how hard it is to cope with these daily struggles. So let's stop with the overuse of the word anxiety and the misrepresentation of anxiety and start seeing it for what it actually is: a mental illness. Stop minimizing and invalidating those with anxiety disorders by using anxiety to describe everyday nerves that everyone will experience at some point.

Why does trivializing anxiety anger me? Because it is not at all a trivial thing.

Daily, I struggle with unconscious self-mutilation. I need an outlet for my anxious feelings, and I take it out on my lips, nails, and skin. Most of the time, I don't even realize I'm picking at my lips, biting my nails, or picking at my dried skin. Looking in the mirror, I'm reminded of my struggles by my swollen, cracked lips, blood around my fingernails, and nails that are bitten down to the cuticle.
I struggle with overthinking the simplest encounters. Are they looking at my face because there's something on it? Was that smile fake? Are they going to go tell their friends about the weird girl they just talked to after we part ways? I will think about a five-minute conversation for hours until I have run through every possible thought they could have had during our encounter.

Overthinking, in general, is one of the biggest struggles as it creates a bitter cycle of anxiety causing you to overthink, which causes more anxiety. When I'm up late at night, it's not just binge-watching Netflix shows (although I do find myself doing that), it's because I'm running through my entire day in my head and thinking of all the different ways each event throughout my day could have occurred. No part of my day just simply happened, in my mind, it could have happened better or worse.

However, I struggle a lot with worst case scenarios. When I think of something that will happen in the future, I think of all the different ways it could go wrong, which puts my brain in overdrive and I get unnecessarily overwhelmed and worked up over completely hypothetical situations. Not to mention, anxiety disorders amplify your fears to an irrational level. Everyone has fears of car accidents, but my fear is so great, I come close to panic attacks doing something as simple as switching lanes or driving at night. I fear social interaction with strangers so heavily because my brain tells me I'm annoying them or they hate me. I have my friend's drive-through fast food drive-thrus for me, I went months without my medication because I was too afraid to call my new psychologist, I ignore phone calls from strangers so that I can hide behind my phone and just text.

And of course, the factor of anxiety everyone is well aware of; the panic attacks. I'm not talking just sweaty hands and a racing heart. Panic attacks feel like your head is being held underwater and you just can't come up for air. It may sound like an over exaggeration, but during a panic attack, it literally feels like you are about to die. You become overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom and loss of control. Panic attacks in their entirety are terrifying, no matter what it's over.

Living with anxiety disorders is being in a constant battle with your brain. It is not the same as merely being nervous. As one of the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders, a lot of people know how difficult and life-altering it is to live with anxiety and for it to be minimized by people who have no idea what real anxiety is like is extremely hurtful, to say the least. Anxiety is not a normal emotion and should no longer be trivialized as such.