People with anxiety obsess over the little things:
Well to most people, they are little things, but to us? They are big.
If you told us that we obsess over little things, it would bother us.
A sideways glance, a short word, it replays in our head over and over.
Someone takes too long to reply by text? They must hate us, something happened or we are annoying.
You can see why dating for us is a nightmare.
The little things are big things to us… and we are always quick to blame ourselves as being the problem.
People with anxiety have every intention of going to an outing, but cancel last minute:
Coffee, a play date, parties, whatever… a person with anxiety is excited to go, but as the day or time creeps up, anxiety can overcome our whole body.
All of a sudden the avalanche of thoughts comes into our head and the thought of going just worries us and puts us right off.
The freight train of thoughts ruins the excitement and turns into exhaustion.
So cancelling sounds like a pretty good idea after all that right? So we do.
We are exhausted:
When your head runs a million miles an hour, your body can’t keep up.
All those thoughts drain you mentally and physically.
Going to bed late from thinking, waking up early and not being able to fall back asleep when thinking… this is us, and it takes a toll.
Going to work is a real mission and often why some anxiety sufferers will call in sick.
Anxiety sufferers replay conversations in our head:
Sometimes I find myself talking so fast I have to stop myself because I can hear myself over explaining things and I’m embarrassed.
Sometimes I replay a discussion that I wished had gone a different way. I’m worried that it sounded bad, or wrong.
Sometimes I’m so scared to say what I feel because of the possible outcome because of how it’ll come off.
So sometimes I’ve learned to stay quiet and that’s usually when people will assume I’m in a “mood.”
Anxiety sufferers compare themselves to others:
Why can she do the things that I can’t do?
Why can’t I just get over it?
Why can’t I enjoy my life like he does?
Anxiety makes us sit on Facebook miserable wondering why we were failures and why everyone’s life is so perfect.
Anxiety sufferers obsess over mistakes and beat ourselves up over it:
Anxiety sufferers are often perfectionist.
I never knew this about myself until someone told me I did something wrong and I burst into tears.
You don’t want to do the wrong things, because that means you’re not good enough, and you struggle with that.
We can think about something that happened 10 years ago and it will fill our chests with dread.
We are always at fault somehow, and that’s really hard.
And finally…
Please, please don’t give up on us.
We know we sound irrational, but if we could click our fingers we would stop it, but we can’t.
We don’t use at as an excuse
It’s okay if you don’t know what to do.
We are trying our hardest.
You don’t need to fix us, you just need to accept us.
And most of all, we appreciate you.
This story was submitted to Love What Matters by Laura Mazza of Australia. You can follow her on Facebook. Be sure to subscribe to our free email newsletter for our best love stories.