Anxiety is not some silly, excusable illness. When you have it, it likes to consume every thought in your head and act like that paranoid friend who no one likes to be around. However, if you sit down and think about what anxiety tells you, it is kind of ridiculous. Anxiety is different for everyone. Sometimes, people have social anxiety and others have extremely serious panic attacks. Here is a list of things that pop in my head the most with anxiety, as ridiculous as they sound.
I'm going to be late.
This is something so fermented into my being that my roommate needs to talk me out of it sometimes. I leave the house 30 minutes early for everything. I check traffic reports to see if I need to add extra time. On campus, I live in the middle of everything but still need to leave 15 minutes to get to my classes. When I have class at 1:00, I need to go to lunch at 12:00. Anytime after, I anxiously bite my nails the whole time thinking I'm going to be late. Maybe the reason for it is that I don't want to inconvenience anyone. I need everyone to think that I'm on top of things (when I'm clearly not). This usually ends up in me trying to find a place to twiddle my thumbs while everyone else isn't even there yet.
They/he/she hates me.
This is something that is the utmost root of my anxiety. If someone looks at me a certain way, they hate me. If someone reads my text message and doesn't respond, they hate me. If someone ignores my Snapchat, they hate me. If I ask someone if they hate me, they hate me. You can see where this is going. However, my brain doesn't. As soon as I go there, which is very often, I get nervous, clammy, my breathing gets shorter and quicker, and I don't know how to handle myself. No matter who my friends are or where I am in life, this part of me can never escape.
Where am I going to park when I get there? What lane should I be in?
A lot of things about driving makes my anxiety spin in a loop. If I don't know where I'm going to park when I get there, forget about it. Someone else can drive. Merging onto the highway is the scariest part of my day, and don't even get me started about traffic. I need to know what lane I should be in at all times, because switching lanes makes me extremely nervous. If there's no one in the lane I need to be in in five miles, I need to switch at that very moment. A lot of this anxiety comes from driving a killing machine on wheels. My brain automatically switches to "I'm going to die" in about three seconds at any moment while driving.
Does this outfit look okay? No it definitely doesn't. I'm not going to class.
Picking out an outfit for the day can create havoc in my room. If I can't find something to wear, I automatically think people will hate me and make fun of me. If a shirt is too tight, I won't leave the house. Sometimes I don't go out on the weekends because I have nothing to wear. My roommate has to answer 100 questions a day about my appearance. Is this shirt see through? Do my pants match my shirt? Does my hair look greasy? Appearance gives me extreme anxiety because I assume people will judge me for what I look like. Shoutout to American culture in 2016!
Some people may say, "Just get over it, it's not a big deal," and those people are extremely ignorant. Anxiety is not something to laugh at and it's not something you can "get over." It's a real mental illness that thousands of people have in America alone.
“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.” -Epictetus
