{"id":24137,"date":"2026-10-29T09:54:31","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/?p=24137"},"modified":"2026-10-29T09:54:31","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T14:54:31","slug":"living-with-chronic-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/2026\/10\/29\/living-with-chronic-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"Living With Chronic Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

I want to preface this by saying that I\u2019m not trying to overstate my anxiety and how badly it affects me. I mean, I\u2019d freak out every single day at the drop of a hat before I was medicated, and even now if I go around 3 days without medication, I become a sniveling mess who constantly thinks someone is gonna pop up and slit her wrists or that I have a chronic illness I wasn\u2019t aware of that\u2019s gonna cause me to drop dead in 5 business days. I’m still nowhere close to the poster child for severe anxiety and paranoia. However, I do know enough about myself to talk about how it has impacted my development and everyday life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I believe my earliest anxiety attack\/derealization episode, that I can remember, happened when I was 8. So, yeah. I\u2019ve had this for over half of my life. It\u2019s all hereditary so there was never something I could do about it, and that affected the way I went about making friends and keeping them when I was little. I\u2019d find someone I thought would \u201cprotect\u201d me from my irrational fears and then I\u2019d hang onto them as hard as I could. As you can imagine, this got me into some bad friendships.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember my anxiety hitting its peak in 8th grade, where, if I was sat near someone who tended to make noise, I would break down sobbing from them just tapping the desk or talking to themselves. This continued throughout that entire year, and it really impacted my relationships with my peers. They thought something was wrong with me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I\u2019ll be so honest, I get why.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019d lash out and cry at certain stimuli. (I know this sounds like other mental disorders, but I swear anxiety is the real cause for all of this). I\u2019d even sit in class with my wrists constantly tucked into me so that no one could run up and slit my wrists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, I started high school.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was a new environment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I cried often from the sheer amount of people, and chose to sit alone whenever possible so I wouldn\u2019t get on someone’s nerves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I isolated myself on purpose, and that continued till the second semester of my freshman year, where I would finally become medicated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And I have to say\u2026 meds were DEFINITELY the answer in my case.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I can finally have normal relationships.<\/span><\/p>\n

I can finally have a fairly normal day to day life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And while it is true that meds didn\u2019t help all of my symptoms and are nowhere close to an end all be all, (I still can\u2019t leave the house without the thought that someone will run up and shoot me out of nowhere) they have significantly improved my quality of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, meds are not the answer for the majority of people, and, as I said before, I am in no way representative of all people with anxiety and paranoia. This is just my personal story of my struggles. I\u2019m not proud of it, but if it\u2019ll help at least one person realize that these are real symptoms that real people feel, then it\u2019d be all worth it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to preface this by saying that I\u2019m not trying to overstate my anxiety and how badly it affects me. I mean, I\u2019d freak out every single day at the drop of a hat before I was medicated, and even now if I go around 3 days without medication, I become a sniveling mess … Continue reading “Living With Chronic Anxiety”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24180,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24137\/revisions\/24180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}