I know I don't have many followers, but I shared some of my thoughts on my facebook wall the other day and I got a pretty overwhelming response from friends, so I thought I would share it here as well. The truth is, we try not to let Anxiety, worry and over-thinking become our identity but it's really difficult not to.
Anxiety is like having the best imagination but the story line always goes to the worst case scenario every time. It's really hard for people who don't suffer from this to understand the people who do. They don't understand why we might need to be reassured every day that we are still worthy, that we are still loved and that the reason you didn't text us back within the hour is not because you are laughing at us behind our back or rolling your eyes at how annoying whatever we said was. Employers don't understand why we might tense up and panic when they say they need to talk to us -surely we must be getting fired for something we did wrong-. People with anxiety generally realize how unrealistic their fears are but can't get past them long enough to believe that they might not be true. We don't want to feel this way. We don't want to doubt every nice thing anyone ever says. We know that there is a good chance that no one is pointing and laughing when we go out in public and that we're not our family's least favorite person, but those thoughts creep in time and time again and a lot of times we sabotage relationships because we react on those things, because in our mind, those things are our reality. We become that annoying person because we need more reassurance than the average person. We might seclude ourselves because we're sure that no one really wants to see us, or we might get overbearing because we just need to be sure in that moment that you care about us. I know that a lot of people deal with this every. single. day, and want them to know they are not alone... and I need to say thank you to the people who love us anyway, to the people who don't get tired of telling us that we are beautiful and that we matter. And to the people who think that we're just a basket case, well yes we probably are to you. Try to imagine a computer screen with 1000 tabs open at the same time, and all of them are open to your worst fears, all at once. It's exhausting for us to be with ourselves, I can just imagine how exhausting it is for everyone else.
