Anxiety’s Control Over Us
“I have anxiety” is, unfortunately, a common statement. However, everyone’s anxiety looks different. Usually anxiety sparks from a fear someone has. For example, my biggest fear is throwing up. It’s a common fear, and also a very unfortunate fear, it takes an insane amount of control over my life! People experience this with all kinds of fears, and depending on how bad your fear and your anxiety is, the amount of control it has over you differs. I can’t speak for everyone when I describe what I went through, but if someone relates, I hope you know you are not alone.
I don’t think I fully understood how anxiety could control our bodies in weird ways until sleeping started to become a struggle for me at school. Over the course of a few weeks, I had 3 or 4 random panic attacks in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if it was the stress of finals coming up, winter break, social life, or what was causing it, however it got to the point where I sat on the phone with my parents for 4 hours and woke my roommate up to physically come hold me while my body uncontrollably shook. I thought something was seriously wrong with me and the entire time I was so focused on my body and what I was feeling. I was terrified I was going to throw up. Eventually, I fell asleep at 3am on our futon watching The Kardashians, and missed my first two classes of the day. The following evening, my parents drove to school and I stayed with them at a hotel. Almost every night leading up to winter break, my body shook as I went to bed, and the warm tingling sensation of anxiety crept up through my body.
Why this happened every single night is a question I don’t have the answer to. But my body knew that I wasn’t comfortable and “safe”. I was, in fact, safe in my dorm at a private university, but it’s a different kind of safe feeling that comes with feeling at home and being surrounded by the people you love. Although I did love my few friends there, I wasn’t safe in that sense and my body knew it. When I went back to school after winter break, the anxiety came more often. My body would shake on and off throughout the whole day, I would be shivering but I wasn’t cold, my acid reflux would get increasingly worse with my anxiety, my acne was really bad, my vision would be off, my heart would race, my stomach and throat would feel tight and I didn’t have the ability to relax it, my body would be extremely tense, and my back often hurt after walking around for a little bit. Looking back, I remember times growing up, especially in high school, where I would experience some of these symptoms and I had no idea that it was anxiety related.
While all these things can happen within our body, it also holds us back from things in life. Since I was a little girl, I have never wanted kids. And the main reason for that is because the women in my family have had awful, and extremely ill pregnancies. With my biggest fear being throwing up, that simply won’t work out well for me. With time, I do think I will end up having kids but as of right now my fear is holding me back from even considering that, and it sucks. This fear also controls me in the sense that I won’t go on rollercoasters, I won’t go near people who are sick, I sanitize everything, I often worry about food poisoning, I won’t go on a cruise due to the possibility of getting seasick, I wear pressure point wrist bands when driving long distance’s, and so much more.
It’s not fair that fear can have this hold on us, but life isn’t always fair. I’ve learned so much about my body throughout all of this and even though it’s awful and uncomfortable, I know how to pinpoint my anxiety and try to come up with a solution. Through a lot of therapy, I’m also learning how to sit in the uncomfortable feelings because sometimes you can’t just make it go away and fix it. Things take time and it’s important to learn how to deal with that. If you are someone who relates to any of these things, I am so sorry. But I want you to know it will pass eventually. Again, it may take time and a lot of hard days but what is meant for you will be, and if you are not in the right place at this moment, that’s okay. The time will come to move on and start over and these feelings will eventually pass. Everything is a learning experience and everything happens for a reason.