Jasmine Nicole

Whew, this is a long one so stay with me.

So, I have anxiety/social anxiety. I’ll say that again for myself, I suffer from anxiety.

Now, social anxiety is a mental health condition that causes irrational anxiety around social situations. For example, a person with social anxiety is constantly worried about what other people think about them, they’re worried about being embarrassing, humiliating themselves, or offending someone. I got that information from Mayo Clinic so it’s legit, but it’s also how I feel and that’s legit too.

I think I’ve had it for a longer time than I could even tell but it wasn’t until recently that it was getting in the way of me living my life in peace. I was struggling at work, and a lot of things around work were causing me stress. I recall having a panic attack at work because I had to step in for a teacher unexpectedly and was so worried. I quit a job because I was suffering and wasn’t happy and thought the change would help, but it didn’t. I thought maybe I needed to change my profession. I was having panic attacks at home, I was experiencing depressive symptoms. It was a lot. For a while, I thought I was just overwhelmed and that it would all go away once things thinned out, but it only got worse over the course of a year.

Until recently, I realized how much of my anxiety began to creep into my day to day life and take over who I was. Again, I thought it was my job, but then I noticed the things I did outside of work that stemmed from the anxiety. I recall taking to my therapist about how I made it a thing to plan my outfits down to my underwear every single night because I could not make a fool of myself. Why? I don’t know and I thought it was so normal until I found myself getting upset and panicking that I couldn’t find matching leggings to a skirt one night.

I constantly turned down going out with people or hanging out with old friends because the idea of going out and being me was too much. I was guaranteed to make a fool of myself especially if there was drinking involved. I remember going out with a friend and replaying the entire night in my head for months afterwards because I thought that I did something embarrassing and couldn’t let it go. As dumb as it sounds, it was a wake up call.

I often have this inner monologue of phrases like, “they won’t like me”, “what is wrong with me”, “they won’t want me around “, “ this is why you don’t have friends”. Even as I write this, I have a million things I’m saying to myself that have nothing to do with what I think about what I’m writing, but what someone else will think.

All of these things were slowly breaking me down. And I am the type of person to push down anything inside of me that I feel is harmful to address. Feeling lonely? Read a book, watch TV. Feeling insecure about something? I’ll ignore it until something better replaces it. I didn’t want to deal with all that and it came back with a vengeance.

I was having trouble sleeping, not being physically healthy, not addressing the nagging feelings inside of me. And the latter is a skill I had perfected over years and years of practice.

Now, anxiety is normal. It is normal to have some fear about things because it’s our natural response to stress. If you are walking through a dark alley at night or going to a job interview, your body will naturally feel nervous and anxious. That is normal. But what isn’t okay is when you stop and alter life to feed into anxiety.

When anxiety gets so bad that you have to drastically alter your life, that’s not okay. I thought of going back to nursing school so many times, which is NOT an easy thing, to avoid teaching and my triggers that work causes. That is what happens when anxiety gets the best of you because your response it to run the other way when you need to run head first into it in order to manage it.

To be clear, I do know that some situations you should run from, you shouldn’t stay or deal with anything that causes you true harm. When something is really breaking you down physically or mentally, then get away.

I’ve been going to therapy in an effort to control my anxiety, because truth is it’ll always be there. I am working on trying to identify my triggers and then identify how to fight those triggers.

One way I’ve been doing that is to say affirmations and honestly it’s hard. I love words, books, and writing, yet I find it hard to find the power in using words to manifest positive energy within myself. In theory, it sounds silly to me, but it’s something that I have to work at and I’m not fully there yet.

I’m writing this to maybe help someone, I don’t want pity or anything other than maybe help somebody see that’s it’s okay to admit that you need help and that it’s then okay to reach out for help. We cannot fix everything on our own, all the time.