My Anxiety, Part I: The Origin Story
In an attempt to explain my anxiety to my husband, I searched the internet for effective ways to do this and found a lot of useless information that was more often about positive thinking than actually living with anxiety. However, I did come across a few articles written by people who suffer from anxiety on the level I do — real people with real anxiety trying to explain what it’s like to live with this type of mental illness. Yes, I say “mental illness” because anxiety is a problem in the brain, not a way of thinking. It cannot be just ignored or cured through positive thoughts, meditation, or my doctor’s favorite prescription of “diet and exercise.”
The one thing these articles and many other websites that try to explain anxiety have in common is simply expressing the feelings and emotions that anxiety sufferers go through. It isn’t just stress and worry; it can be so much more than that. I have learned that experiences and techniques to overcome an anxiety attack vary from person to person, and I am realizing that is why nothing has ever helped me to cope: no one in the world is like me.
For me, anxiety comes in waves, sometimes stronger than others. It often helps when I write, whether that is a blog post, a researched article, or a fictional story. After reading a few articles about explaining one’s anxiety to others, I sat down to write, and that…
