It’s officially Fall! Which means I’ll probably be posting more about mental health the next couple of months to help cope with my seasonal depression. Woo!
I was scrolling on Facebook the other day and saw a blog post titled, “This is what anxiety looks like.” It got me thinking about how anxiety is “supposed” to look. I think when we start to label anxiety as “looking” a certain way, we discredit people whose anxiety looks different from our idea of it.
For me, anxiety is waking up feeling fatigued after a full nights sleep and grinding my teeth like it’s nobody’s business. It’s numbness in my hands and feeling like I don’t even have the strength to hold a pencil. It’s having a panic attack in the shower and having to get out and lay on the bathroom floor until I can breathe again. It’s running across campus to the counselor’s office and getting there only to have nothing to say but instead cry and that’s okay because she understands. It’s making sure I have my anxiety medicine in my carry-on and arriving to the airport three hours before my departure because I’d rather wait in my terminal for two hours than have to worry about not making it to my gate. It’s struggling with an eating disorder for 3 years because being able to have control over something felt worth it, even if it meant hurting myself.
While these tendencies are mine, that doesn’t mean they are everyone’s. My cousin bites her nails, sometimes until they bleed. My best friend digs her nails into the fatty parts of her arms and legs. I’ve known people who pull their hair out, have muscle spasms, eye twitches, or shiver uncontrollably. Some people clean like crazy, binge drink/eat, or just shut down. Anxiety is all of these things but it is also so much more.
You see, if I only counted anxiety as the people who can’t sleep the night before traveling or someone whose instinct to loss of control was bulimia, I’d be leaving out a huge group of people who struggle with the same thing I do. I’d be ignoring the fact that ! 40 million ! Americans deal with anxiety and that every one of those 40 million people lives a life I know close to nothing about. Mental illness isn’t something that can be put into a box, because much like people – it just isn’t that simple. When we realize that mental illness looks a lot of different ways, whether that’s anxiety, depression, PTSD, OCD, etc. we can better drop the stigma around it and be there for ourselves and our friends who are hurting. I think that’s something even I can do better at.
If you are thinking about suicide or just need to talk to someone, you can speak to someone by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or by texting HOME to 741741, the Crisis Text Line. Suicide help-lines outside the US can be found here.
Christina Claire 