My Anxiety Lore

I’ve been pretty open about my postpartum anxiety, but since I stopped breastfeeding, it’s like my body reset to factory settings. Now I’m dealing with my old, familiar general anxiety disorder. I wish I could say it’s easier to manage—but it’s not. 

Pretty sure it can now be classified as high functioning anxiety. 

And it’s safe to say that my anxiety has been having a field day with me lately, especially in the last 24 hours. I’ve been stuck in this state of inexplicable dread. The kind that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin, or find a switch to shut your mind off completely.

I messed up at work by having my phone on DND, and that was just the beginning. Since then, I’ve been fixated on one small thing—wondering if an email I sent made me sound arrogant, or unlike the person I’ve worked so hard to present myself as. I haven’t really been able to think about anything else.

I know what you might be thinking: Why aren’t you doing breathing exercises? Why aren’t you grounding yourself? What good does worrying do when you can’t predict the future? The truth is, none of that has ever really helped me. There was a time I was in therapy, pretending the coping exercises were working—just so I wouldn’t seem crazier than I already felt. I’ve had anxiety for as long as I can remember. In middle school, I somehow always found ways to avoid presentations. 

I’ve always hated using my voice. I used to count how many people came before me on the list, heart pounding, rehearsing how I’d say “Hello, my name is…” over and over again. But I didn’t know that was anxiety. I thought anxiety meant hyperventilating and crying like in the fanfics I used to read. It wasn’t until I was 19—after a heartbreak—that I started noticing strange things. I became afraid of thunderstorms because I associated them with emotional pain and unease. Imagine being a Twilight lover and suddenly terrified of hoa hoa hoa weather.

A lot had happened around that time. I started to wonder if maybe I did have anxiety—but someone in my life kept yapping about how I shouldn’t self-diagnose something people “genuinely struggle with.”

Then came my first year of university. Yoh. What a time.

I got my diagnosis not long after a friend from high school passed away. His death shook me to my core and triggered all my buried fears about mortality. I had just seen him two weeks before. We’d spoken days before he died. I couldn’t make sense of it. Then the same guy I had foolishly believed was the love of my life broke my heart. Then came more loss. It was too much, too close together.

The panic attacks started with full-body tremors. Then came the nausea. I hate nausea. It’s a sea of horrible anticipation. Am I going to throw up or not?

That’s my anxiety. It’s stifling. And it honestly does require medication.

I was on meds at one point, but I started worrying about what I was putting my body through—antidepressants, migraine medication, and now anxiety meds too? What about my liver? I was swallowing pills every day and eventually told myself I’d have to thug one of these things out.

I can admit now, five years later, that I probably shouldn’t have put my anxiety on the back burner. I saw a WhatsApp status earlier that said, “My mind can’t function normally and I’ve tried.” It hit hard, because I really have tried.

And current life events? They’re not helping.

I can’t keep pretending my anxiety isn’t debilitating. I can’t romanticize it. I wouldn’t even know how. It’s not that I want to find meaning in it. This isn’t a personality trait. It’s just… hard. A diagnosis was a relief, yes—proof that I wasn’t imagining it. That I wasn’t delusional about what was happening in my own body.

But knowing what it is doesn’t make it any easier to carry. Some days, anxiety is background noise—something I’ve learned to live with. But then there are days like today, where it takes center stage and I become a bystander in my own life, watching myself spiral over something I know, logically, is small. But to my nervous system? Catastrophic.

I wish I had a neat conclusion or some uplifting takeaway. But today, I don’t. Today, I’m just sitting with the truth instead of pretending I’m fine. 

I’m not okay. And honesty has to count for something, right?

So here’s to being soft in a body that’s constantly tense… to surviving, even when it doesn’t look graceful.