omg anxiety post
via http://ift.tt/2e7r1OR:
strix-alba:
Sorry for clogging up dashes with obnoxiously personal shit that no one cares about, but …
… holy shit I think I actually have regular-people levels of social anxiety most of the time now, not ‘curl up in a ball and hide from the world because the world will stomp on your everything’ levels of anxiety, for literally the first time in my life. (I can tell you about the time I crawled under the kitchen table to cry when I was in kindergarten because I didn’t have friends like other people, so when I say as long as I can remember, I mean as long as I can remember.) It is like … wow. I feel like someone took an enormous lead backpack off my shoulders, and it was the first time I even realized that the backpack was actually this heavy-duty external-frame monster packed with a years’ worth of lead bread, instead of a dinky drawstring bag with a couple of notebooks inside like I’d been lead to believe.
I do feel a little guilty, because what right do I have to be happy when other people are still anxious, and need medication to deal with it, because it doesn’t just go away like that for them? But fuck it. In a lot of ways my life has been very easy, but this is definitely not one of them, and I am going to publicly celebrate this while it lasts.
I wrote this in the spring of 2013, if I recall correctly, and I just want to say that whenever the question comes up of “what‘s the happiest moment of your life?” it is unequivocally this day, walking up the hill from my apartment to campus and realizing that I wasn’t terrified of running into someone I knew on the way to class. I have had top surgery, I’ve started dating someone really important to me, I’ve done successful conference presentations, and nothing stands out quite as much as the moment I realized that my anxiety was under control for the first time in my entire life.
strix-alba:
Sorry for clogging up dashes with obnoxiously personal shit that no one cares about, but …
… holy shit I think I actually have regular-people levels of social anxiety most of the time now, not ‘curl up in a ball and hide from the world because the world will stomp on your everything’ levels of anxiety, for literally the first time in my life. (I can tell you about the time I crawled under the kitchen table to cry when I was in kindergarten because I didn’t have friends like other people, so when I say as long as I can remember, I mean as long as I can remember.) It is like … wow. I feel like someone took an enormous lead backpack off my shoulders, and it was the first time I even realized that the backpack was actually this heavy-duty external-frame monster packed with a years’ worth of lead bread, instead of a dinky drawstring bag with a couple of notebooks inside like I’d been lead to believe.
I do feel a little guilty, because what right do I have to be happy when other people are still anxious, and need medication to deal with it, because it doesn’t just go away like that for them? But fuck it. In a lot of ways my life has been very easy, but this is definitely not one of them, and I am going to publicly celebrate this while it lasts.
I wrote this in the spring of 2013, if I recall correctly, and I just want to say that whenever the question comes up of “what‘s the happiest moment of your life?” it is unequivocally this day, walking up the hill from my apartment to campus and realizing that I wasn’t terrified of running into someone I knew on the way to class. I have had top surgery, I’ve started dating someone really important to me, I’ve done successful conference presentations, and nothing stands out quite as much as the moment I realized that my anxiety was under control for the first time in my entire life.