Coping With Anxiety

It's funny. At this very moment, I'm listening to the Dear Evan Hansen soundtrack, in which Evan has mild anxiety. My anxiety only really started in middle school. Why? Because I had this so-called friend who tried to turn all my friends against me. Seriously, I'm not kidding. They'd say lies about me and people would come back to me and say, "I can't believe you said that about me" or "You're an awful person." I cried a lot because they were taking their disliking of me out of proportion. LOL...says the person who has anxiety. I would ask to go to the bathroom and then cry. I was pretty good at hiding the fact that I would have panic attacks and cry because of them, up until one day. They had this girl go and send hate to me for no absolutely reason. I broke down crying and went to my teacher about it. The person behind all the problems I was having got nothing said to them. So much for a "no tolerance" bullying policy, right? I forgave them after all they did to me and they just kept hurting me and hurting me. I've finally pushed them out of my life because I couldn't handle all they've been doing to me. I kept messaging my mom asking her to pick me up from school one day because I couldn't handle it. My mom didn't pick me up, but I can understand why. It was only second block. I needed to suck it up. It took a lot of attempting to calm myself down in the bathroom for me to finally go back to class. For the rest of the day, I was stuttering and trying to avoid eye contact.

Most of my anxiety originated from school work or fights I got into with my then boyfriend. I would have panic attacks because I wasn't going to get a good grade or my boyfriend would yell at me and call me dumb. That's one of my panic attack triggers, people yelling at me in a harsh tone. It's ridiculous, I know, but it's justified. I remember my seventh grade science teacher once yelled at the whole class and I just sat there having a panic attack. My mom later went and told her she needed to watch her tone, basically. Hahah. She did stop yelling, though. I hate to get into this, but I had so much anxiety that it made my stomach hurt, which made me stop eating because most of the time my stomach would hurt. Within that month, I had lost somewhere around 25 pounds and I was nearly underweight. This led into hour-long drives to a hospital for check ups on my weight. Of course, same thing every time. "Stop stressing!!" Gee, thanks. I'll just turn off the switch labeled "'Anxiety." I still have those appointments, even though I gained a whopping 11 pounds, and my body shows it.

What I get the most is, "you don't understand what it's like." Umm, I have anxiety? What's funny is, most of the time, it's from people who stress over stuff like "OMG Jake broke up with me for stupid Christine!!1!1" (Be More Chill reference). I stress over my schoolwork, social events, and people literally sending other people to constantly attack me. You break up with me for some other chick? Cool, thanks for wasting my time, but I'm not gonna rant for the next two months about how you only think with your...naaah. Anyways, another thing I hear a lot is that I'm "overreacting". ...I'm sorry, what? You don't tell someone with anxiety that. As if my panic attack is suddenly going to end and I'm going to be calling you my savior for opening my eyes to realize I'm "overreacting". So, think about how your words will affect someone with anxiety. I know a while ago, I would hate people bringing attention to the fact that I have major anxiety, but I would also hate when people ignored me having a panic attack. Thank you for reading, please consider all I've written, and watch out for the signs of someone with anxiety. Some of the signs include: avoidance of eye contact, stumbling over words, heavy breathing, and fidgeting.