My Experience with Anxiety

I've always thought that I had some kind of anxiety. I've never been diagnosed, and I've only been vocal about in the last year or so. I've always known that other people had worse anxiety than I do, and so I've never actually talked about it before. I always felt bad, complaining about the anxiety issues that I had because I knew it was worse for others, and so that made me feel like I had no right to complain about anything.

Regardless of this, I always knew that my anxiety levels were most likely higher than they should be, so I basically took on "having anxiety" as a part of my identity. Then, last week, I was on Tumblr and I found this social anxiety test and I took it, out of curiosity. I've always grappled with whether I had social anxiety or not, or if it was just a more general kind of anxiety. I wanted to know, and Internet tests are probably better for just a rough, general idea than for an actual diagnosis, obviously, but still. I figured it would be interesting.

So I took it, and the results stated that I didn't have any social anxiety. I've never been more in shock and confused in my life than when I read those results. For some reason, despite the fact that I've never been sure about whether I actually have social anxiety or not, this shocked me. It felt like anxiety was entirely erased as part of my identity because this Internet test was telling me that I didn't have any. This test is one of those where you have to rate your feelings about different situations, and I hate those because I never know how to answer them in a way that properly shows the amount of anxiety that I have about them. So it's hard to get a straight answer and you could take it a million times and get a million different results based on how you rate things, because the answers you give will probably never be the same.

I actually retook it again before writing this and I ended up with a higher score this time that indicated that I had moderate social anxiety, so my levels are probably somewhere around mild to moderate anxiety. If I really think about it, I feel like a lot of what I consider to be anxiety is just my subconscious beating on me about something stupid that I did during the day that day as I lie awake at night, unable to sleep because my brain won't turn off. I think that I always just labelled it as anxiety because that was the closest term that I knew for what was actually happening in my brain. Maybe it is what's happening in my brain, but just not in relation to socializing with others. I work retail, my entire job centers around talking to strangers on a regular basis, and I'm pretty okay with that.

Honestly, I think it has more to do with paranoia than anything else. I'm always so in my head about everything and worrying about everyone and everything besides myself, and I get so caught up in everything that I just end up internally yelling at myself for a week after something bad happens because I feel so personally responsible for the entire situation, whether it was actually my fault or not. I really struggle with the ability to forgive myself for things and just push them out of my mind. I dwell on things so much that it kind of morphs into feelings of anxiety, mostly driven by paranoia, that a similar situation will happen again and it'll be my fault, etc etc. It's also just a lot of me overthinking almost everything that comes out of my mouth and thinking about everything I do and say to everyone that I meet. My brain seems to have a scale of severity for these events that determines how quickly I forget about them/stop thinking about it every moment of the day, and honestly, I wish the lowest level of "forget about it almost immediately" applied to everything, but, alas, it does not. It gets worse when I'm alone and not occupied, because then all I have to do is think, and that's never fun for me, because depending on the day, I can get to a pretty dark place pretty quickly.

Just to quickly sum up my experience with anxiety, it could only be described as "confusing and damaging". Confusing, because I never know anything about it, and damaging, because it's gotten its hold on me and crushed me for a few days at a time before, and those times are never fun.