In my sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with a high anxiety disorder. It’s a scary thing, as a high school-er, to be told you have any kind of “disorder.” You feel different, like you were made wrong, like you don’t even have control over your mind or body anymore. You don’t want to tell anyone; you don’t want them to think you’re “sick” with this “disease.” But at the same time you want to tell them, so that they know when you cancel plans, it isn’t because you don’t want to see them - it’s because the thought of leaving the house sometimes makes you so anxious you could cry.
Living with an anxiety disorder is hard. Mine typically has two settings: high and low. When my anxiety is extremely low, I seem to not have a single worry in my mind. Which would seem good, right? Wrong. I am so NOT anxious, that I put off all my work and sit in front of my TV for hours binge-watching Netflix just because I’m not thinking about anything at all. So NOT anxious that I sleep in and skip my class on Thursday morning without even a second thought, because I honestly just don’t care at that point. It makes me unmotivated, lazy, and inactive.
This week, my anxiety was extremely high. On Tuesday, my roommate came home to me typing at the speed of light on my laptop doing notes that aren’t even due for another week. She talked “to” me - more like at me because I didn’t respond - for a couple of minutes, and then put on an entire fashion show for me of the clothes she just bought, and I didn’t even blink. Not once. “You’re anxious, aren’t you?” She finally asked after 15 minutes of trying on different Zumba clothes for her classes. I finally ripped my eyes away from the screen, looking at her with bloodshot eyes, and gave her an exasperated “yes.”
You see, on Monday I came back from Thanksgiving break and made a 20-item-long to-do-list for my week. Why? Well, because, my Thanksgiving break consisted of me doing absolutely no schoolwork. Of course, I wasn’t anxious then, because I wasn’t thinking about it. But the second I got back to campus, I felt like my world was caving in on me. 20 to-dos. 20! There was no way I was going to finish all of that during the week… but guess what? It was entirely done by Tuesday night. Just looking at what I had to do made me so anxious that I got all of it done in less than 48 hours. Sounds like a productive two days, right? Wrong.
I may have finished it all in under 48 hours, but that is just because I spent at least 10 of them watching Netflix in order to distract myself from having a panic attack, and was so anxious about wasting my time that I rushed through all of my work. I may have only been anxious for what seemed like an hour, but I can’t even begin to describe the ball of stress that was in the pit of my stomach for that short amount of time. I could barely breathe. I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t finish that work.
Sometimes, my anxiety can make me feel weak. It makes me feel like I can never catch a break, and often contributes to my bad habit of victimizing myself. Truth is? I don’t have any more work than my fellow classmates do. I have virtually no reason to be so worried about utilizing my time. There is a lot more of it than I often assume.
Moral of the story is, don’t let your anxiety get the best of you. You’re going to have bad days where you’re shaking and crying and you don’t really know why, but you kind of feel like the world is ending.
Just breathe. Light a candle, take a long shower, drink some tea. You will get through it, and you’ll come out stronger on the other side. After college, when we have stable incomes, homes, families… we’ll wonder why we ever let ourselves sweat the small stuff. It never really meant much. We’ll find ourselves laughing at the silly things we got worried about, and we’ll remember that we survived the most crippling of days. I promise.
