If you don't suffer from a mental illness it is hard to understand, especially anxiety. It's hard to understand the emotional turmoil and physical toll it takes on your body. The panic and exhaustion you feel. The constant loop of worry that plays around and around in your brain and no matter what you do you can't stop it. The panic that grips your chest, making it hard to breathe and causing you to feel sick to your stomach. The nausea that overcomes making you loose your appetite. The hours you spend over the toilet throwing up only making your worry more. The countless sleepless nights. The nights waking up in panic praying for your mind to calm down and sleep to knock you out.
Anxiety is frustrating. You know you are okay and that what is worrying you may be irrational but anxiety doesn't care. It doesn't care if you are being irrational, it doesn't care if you are going to be okay it comes in anyways and overtakes your life whether you want it to or not. It seems like no matter what you do it never really goes away. It overcomes your life and steals your happiness.
Anxiety can make you feel lonely and hopeless. It can make you feel shame and embarrassed. I mean after all you aren't going to die, it just feels like it. Why can't you handle life like normal people? Why can't you just calm down? It doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself you are okay your body doesn't believe you. Your body is scared and it is reacting in the way it sees fit.
Anxiety makes it hard to focus on anything other than anxiety. It makes life so much more complicated and the smallest of tasks seem so overwhelming. Anxiety is a mental disease and it can be hard to deal with. I understand I have been there. People don't always understand they say pray about it. But what they don't know is that praying about it means you are thinking about it and thinking about it makes you worry more and the cycle spins and spins faster and faster out of control and soon you are hunched over hyperventilating praying to just help you live. Anxiety is scary. You do all you can to survive.
But eventually you find joy. Joy and peace in the little things, maybe for only a second, but it was still there and for a moment you found relief and peace of what was worrying you. Maybe later it is longer, an hour maybe, maybe you even laughed hard for the first time in a long time. Maybe later it's a day and soon the attacks are farther and farther apart and what was worrying you doesn't seem so big anymore. It is those moments that you have to appreciate the good in life because when anxiety hits it is those moments you have to so desperately cling to. It is what makes life worth living.
