What Anxiety Feels Like

Living with anxiety definitely messed up my life.

For those who (luckily) don't know this old friend of mine, I'll try to explain what it is and how it feels to live with it.

I'm not going to copy and paste some boring definition from Wikipedia as everyone can do it at any time of the day and night.

Anxiety appears like a feeling but acts in a different way. Joy, happiness, surprise, even sadness, or disappointment show up as a reaction to something.

Anxiety just show up like the chatty, boring neighbour you have been trying to avoid the whole week with unsuccessful results.

Anxiety is worrying about everything and nothing. It's being scared of that weird tickle in your left eye, presuming it is a clear sign of brain cancer, even if deep inside you know it's the result of a sleepless night you spent thinking about what a disaster it would be if you can't focus at work or at school the following day 'cause you didn't get much sleep.

Anxiety is like a dark shadow that follows you everywhere. It doesn't matter if you're with your friends, with your family, surrounded by strangers in a bus or alone in your room; anxiety is always behind you, staring at you, planning its next move trying to be a step ahead of yourself. Spoiler: it is.

Anxiety is like that grey cloud in a light blue, sunny sky. The kind of cloud that makes you feel insecure if whether or not you should go out and enjoy the sunshine even with the threaten of raining.

Anxiety is feeling everything twice as much, and let it hit twice as hard. There's no moderation. Is all perfect if it comes to happiness (which doesn't happen very often by the way), the world looks just perfect and you feel like a kid playing in the back garden on a warm spring day.

But when it comes to sadness or disappointment, then there's a problem. Even the smallest thing can upset you and make you feel miserable, like when someone doesn't pick up your phone calls and you start overthinking it:

“Maybe he is mad at me and he doesn't want to speak to me anymore.”

“Maybe he's cheating on me with some other girl.”

“Maybe he had a car accident.”

“Or worst, he had a car accident, no one found him and he's lying on some unknown street trying to reach his phone, that's stuck somewhere under the seat, to ask for help he'll never get in time to save his life.”

Or maybe he just fell asleep or is at work and you forgot today isn't his day off. Like it usually is.

Anxiety is also feeling nothing. Sometimes, only sometimes, it acts like a friend and makes you not feel a single thing that should cut you deep and break you into a million little pieces.

But then comes worst: you ask yourself if you'll ever feel something again and if not, is a life with no feelings worth living?

For years I thought I had the answer for that. It was a no, a life with no feelings isn't worth living.

I've been struggling with anxiety since... forever probably, and I always thought about it as dead weight.

Then I realized something that changed my life forever.

This is you; it's part of yourself. You can't be this afraid and worried about every single thing if you don't want so badly to live, to love, and make the most of this amazing experience that is life.