Part one - Me, Myself and Anxiety

Just because I have confidence doesn’t mean I am not anxious.

When I was a little girl of 6 years old, I invited 3/4 of the my class to my birthday party and everyone came. I had an army of friends and I was the leader. When I was 8, my dad brought me a faux leather jacket that everyone wished they had, I never had to worry when the teacher said “in pairs”, we played the games I wanted to play, chased the boys I wanted to chase. 


In high school, my friendships were fiercely close.  After my sister died, I chose select people to be my best friends and I spent almost ever waking moment either with them or talking to them. They never replaced my sister but they filled a hole in my heart and gave me a sisterhood that made me feel a part of something. I didn’t do anything without consulting them and I cared more about my friends than any other thing in my life. I saw the exclusiveness of my friendships as part of my identity. 


I was always able to make new friends. I went to several different schools growing up while my mother ran away from herself and I never failed to make new friendships, stronger than the ones I had left behind. 


In my last years at high school I found out that not everyone liked me and took that revelation really personally. 


For every new person I didn’t connect with, I started to panic. 


At university I entered into a dangerous game of over thinking and hyper-focusing on people and situations.  I took other peoples opinions of me as fact and fixated on what i thought was constructive criticism, obsessed with becoming a more likeable version of myself.  


I was always told I had a lot of “issues” and “baggage”, that I was “sensitive” and “hard work”. Things I became obsessed with compensating for. 


Being in tertiary education was something I was never confident that I fitted into. Coming from a small town of home makers and hard workers who didn’t bother with school I was constantly seeking validation that I actually belonged there. Every day I felt like I had bluffed my way into Uni and was out of my depth, I felt like a fraud and walked around campus, sick to my stomach with worry that everyone could see through me. 


Going to parties and meeting new people were the biggest triggers of anxiety because I was terrified of rejection. Relationships were the most important thing in my life and being rejected by them felt like I had been rejected by life.  I questioned whether it would have an impact on the world if i disappeared completely - the darkest, most narcissistic and self-absorbed place my mind has ever taken me. 


Eventually, what I imagined other people thought of me, became more important than what I thought of myself and the anxiety that began in my head became more and more physical, more and more debilitating and more and more capable of taking over my entire body. 

When I was 20, I was diagnosed with social anxiety which I understood as meaning I was sick - a word that made me hate myself even more.  I started on anti-anxiety medication which, while it alleviated a lot of the symptoms of my anxiety, left me feeling indifferent and I decided that feeling anything was better than feeling nothing. 


When I was 22 I lost a relationship that was really important to me and I decided that enough was enough. It is hard work loving someone who doesn’t love them self and I was sick of being someone else' hard work. I started seeing a psychotherapist who cost my poor dad an arm and a leg, a cost I was determined to justify. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be happy. I decided I deserved it as long as I was willing to work for it. 



Therapy changed my life. I found peace with myself and my relationships - past and present. I understood myself better and I was happy with the things I realised about myself. I was content in the reality that not everyone was going to like me and I believed there would continue to be people who did. 


The reason I feel comfortable writing about this online is because, all things considered, I am proud of who I am. 


No tumblr quote can make you understand how important it is to love yourself.


Allowing myself to feel confident didn’t eliminate my anxiety as much as that would make for a romantic happy ending.  As a self assured, motivated, intrepid and accomplished person I can say that I struggle with anxiety every day.  What I learned growing up in a sea of mental illness is that it appears in different shapes, sizes and severities and effects everyone either directly or indirectly. World mental health statistics estimates that 1 in 4 people suffer from mental illness which to me, seems like an underestimation.

How anxiety effected me was determined by the support I received from others around me and the expectations I put on myself not to let my life be determined by the hands I was dealt, but how I played them. You will meet hundreds of people in your lifetime and have no indication of the different weights they carry, the sleepless nights they spend alone or the suffocating air they breath in each morning. You will watch people enduring horrific panic attacks and have no idea it's happening. Just as one day there will be people who will watch it happening to you. And they won't see it. 


Anxiety feels like you’re standing in an open field but you can’t breath in air. It feels like you’re on a simple path, the same one  you’ve been on every day of your life and all of a sudden a brick wall has appeared and there is no way through. Anxiety doesn’t mean I am shy or I don’t like being around people.  I thrive with people, I am out-going, confident and inquisitive. And I am anxious. Everyday. 


Mental illness is not a personal failure, and just because I have confidence doesn’t mean I am not anxious.