At thirteen years old, a child is supposed to be laughing with their friends, trying new things, seeing new places, going to the movies, playing outside, and enjoying the beginning of their teenage years. Thirteen is an in-between age; where you don't feel like a little kid anymore, but you can't necessarily make adult decisions yet. It's an age where you sit in your room, put on a sad Taylor Swift song, and cry your eyes out ... or was that just me?
Ok, maybe it was just me.
As I left my pre-teen years and entered the big 1-3, my view of the world started to change. I didn't have that normal thirteen year old 'fun' feeling. All my friends would go out and meet boys at the movie theater on Fridays and giggle and hold hands. Sometimes I would go with them too, but even when I was there, I didn't technically feel there. I tried, but something was stopping me mentally, and I just couldn't put my finger on it. My stomach would twist up in knots every time I'd even contemplate going out, my palms would get sweaty, my throat would close up, I would break into tears for absolutely no reason because I was so damn anxious. Nobody understood me at the time (or so I thought), not even my parents could catch onto what was happening with me. I was changing, morphing into a new human being I felt. I wasn't me. I didn't feel right, I didn't feel safe in my own skin. I was gone. A lot of the times when there's anxiety, there's depression too. And of course, I got the full package.
I was tormented in school. Kids had cornered me, threw things at me, yelled at me as I tried to get away from them, and sometimes I would be quietly sitting on the bus minding my own business, and kids would be sitting behind/around me screaming at me calling me a whore and a slut, and other crude names. I felt as if I was nothing, just a piece of garbage everyone walked all over. Even when I came home to try and escape it and decompress, I'd open up my laptop and log onto Facebook or Ask.fm or Twitter just to see my name all over and the horrendous things people were saying about me. My parents decided it'd be best if I deleted my social media, but I realized everything people were saying would still be there and they would continue to write nasty things whether I was present on social media or not; so what's the point? Why not just suffer more, right?
Years went on and even in high school, anxiety had eaten away at me. It defeated me. I thought when I left middle school things would get easier, but they only got worse. I had such a low point in my first year of high school I felt I couldn't go back and there was absolutely no way out. But there was.
In my sophomore year of high school, I (finally) started to see a therapist who completely altered my life for the better. Still to this day I see her, and I never believed it when people told me it would "get better". But it did. It does.
"How much can one person take?" I thought to myself every single night before I went to bed. I questioned myself, my sense of reality, and if this life of mine was worth living. I'd lay there and melt into a giant puddle of anxiety below me, drifting away, crying and crying and crying. But I always woke up the next day, breathing, and ready to take on what was next. I got up no matter what had happened to me. I pushed through every single inch of dread and anxiety I felt and I did it. I made it.
Growing up with anxiety is one hell of a ride. One minute you're on top of the world, and the next you feel like your life is over and you can hardly breathe. But as a child going through something like this, its painful. And it's real. Mental illness IS real, and its vicious.
