When I started therapy at 24, I thought I was healed. I thought I was going to get all of the answers to my questions about the things I was feeling. After speaking to a couple of social workers and a psychiatrist, I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. With this new diagnosis, I began to analyze everything that could possibly trigger my social anxiety; I was having anxiety about having anxiety.
In the first couple of months of trying different medications and techniques to help ease my social anxiety, I began to feel like I was nothing but my diagnosis. I began to avoid growing because I thought my anxiety was bigger than me at one point. The minor anxiety turned into having full blown anxiety attacks, and places that I didn’t have an issue going to on my own now became too scary to go to now. The things I once enjoyed became a lot to handle, and all I did was cry a lot. For something that was suppose to help me feel better mentally, I felt like I was only getting worse. It was visible to everyone around me and by the time the year was ending, my sibling had expressed to their own therapist they were worried that I was suicidal. I quietly was.
Even after all of that happening in the first couple of months living with my diagnosis, I had no idea how to manage it in the midst of finding who I was and balancing life as a person in their mid 20s.
Hi, my name is Liz, and I wish I knew these things about my social anxiety disorder when I was 24.
- I am not my diagnosis. At 24, I was blaming everything that I did on the fact that I had anxiety, and I didn’t understand why those around me began to feel frustrated with me. I couldn’t understand why the people that loved me would be frustrated at something I had no control over. I remember having conversations with friends that simply would tell me I was now using my anxiety as a crutch. I thought they were being insensitive to my mental health, and I didn’t realize just how much they were right until I began to not introducing myself as “Liz, the girl with an anxiety disorder.” While my anxiety may look different than the next person which the same diagnosis, it does not mean that I am nothing without it. I wish I was aware enough to realize this in the gist of dealing with a new diagnosis; a lot of my younger years wouldn’t have had been wasted trying to find myself with my diagnosis clouding my judgement.
- It’s not impossible to be assertive when you have “people-pleasing” tendencies. A big thing I learned about SAD at 24 was that a lot of it was triggered by pleasing those around me. In my relationship at the time, I wanted to appear as this perfect girl that wanted to be shown to others as “the perfect girl”. Academically, I wanted to show my family that I was best at what I did and be the subject of those “my daughter is pursuing her master’s” talks despite me mentally struggling to keep up with the work and with myself. In the middle of wanting to please those around me, I still was able to notice when people crossed the boundaries I have (even when I was too scared to voice them out to others). With each therapy session I had, I was reminded that I needed to be more assertive with those in my life and in situations where I need to stick up for myself. That involved confrontation, which is the worst option for someone dealing with an anxiety disorder. For awhile, it seemed impossible for me to learn assertiveness while being deemed as a “people-pleaser” (and update to 6 years later: I still struggle with it), but as I’ve grown and had experiences that required me to put it in action, I’ve learned that–like everything else in life–there’s always a balance. Yes, I can be considerate of people’s feelings but still hold them accountable when they use me as a scapegoat for their emotions. Yes, I can still be a good person to people but still be selfish with myself if I feel like I’m being disrespected. Yes, confrontation is inevitable but they will also help you learn life lessons you take with you in decades to come.
- You cannot control other people and their thoughts, situations, and things that have nothing to do with you. A couple of years ago, I had a hard time learning what was truly in my control and what wasn’t. When things would get bad in my life, I constantly felt the need to control the situation so it the outcome wasn’t as unpredictable as I anticipated. A red flag in anxiety disorders. When relationships weren’t as great and healthy as they use were, I tried to preserve as much of it as possible to the part that it hurt me more holding on than to let them go. It got worse when I found other things to try to control during my weight-loss journey. Although it’s not as bad as it once was, I’ve come to terms that there will be some level of control I need in order to ease my anxiety… even if it causes more anxiety. To be quite honest, I still struggle to regulate my need to control things when I’m in stressful or high-anxiety situations. Cue in another red flag in anxiety disorders: impulsive decisions. At 24, I was unable to accept the fact that I couldn’t control how people reacted in situations or how they perceived me, and it truly doesn’t go away until you get older (or until you realize that other people’s thoughts and feelings have nothing to do with you.)
- Be gentle with yourself; it’s never an “end-all” situation. Anxiety will make you feel like you are damned to ever not feel happiness in your life (which is crazy to even deem as true, but I did in my mid 20s). With an anxiety disorder, it is an extremely important to remember to be gentle with yourself. In my 20s, my anxiety constantly made me feel like I was my own worst enemy. I was constantly on this emotional rollercoaster; if I felt happy for too long I always had to question the authenticity of my feelings. I tried to fix everything in my life that I thought was broken even if I was the one that made things worse in the process. For most of my 20s, I had this belief that I was not worthy of being loved because I couldn’t find many reasons to love myself first. My anxiety had made me believe that my mental disorder made me damaged goods. Let’s be real now: mental health almost a decade ago was a topic most people were still scared to talk about due to the stigma behind it. Many of us who had mental issues at the time wasn’t diagnosed until it affected your daily functioning and you were already on a path of self-destruction. I wish when I was at 24 I had a little bit of clarity and understanding on what it meant to deal with a mental disorder and didn’t feed into the belief that having a poor mental health meant you were not capable of feeling or maintaining happiness in my life. I wish at 24, mental health was something that was socially acceptable as it is these days. I’m not saying that mental health is easier to handle these days (sometimes it feels like its the opposite with all the knowledge we have about it now), but it’s definitely something that doesn’t make you feel isolated anymore.
Anxiety in my 30s already feels so different to me than it was in my 20s. Besides having a better understanding and gained a level a self-awareness because of my anxiety, I’ve noticed my conversations shifting to other anxiety-inducing topics that I wasn’t even thinking about in my 20s. These days, I try to view my anxiety as a spicy add-on; while it doesn’t make everything I do hard, it still challenges me to see if I’m going to take on the task or be comfortable and avoiding it. (I’m looking at my partner who made me call for takeout the other night; needlesstosay, I felt good once that phone call was over!)
There’s a ton of things wish I knew about my anxiety when I was younger; sometimes I reflect back and think about all the time I wasted being too engulfed in my anxiety during my 20s. I will probably say this again about my 30s when I finish them in a decade. I don’t dwell on the time lost when I think back; things were meant to happen the way they did and if they didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be where I’m at these days. These have ultimately been the best years of my life because of my experiences, and I wouldn’t trade them in for the world.
Letters From Liz. 