Being an extrovert and living with anxiety
Do you know what living with general anxiety feels like? Yes there is the day-to-day anxious personality but general anxiety is another ball of wax.
It sits like a horseshoe in the pit of your stomach, a tiny voice in your ear telling you that you are not good enough and worrying yourself sick over things that may never even come. It’s trying to tell yourself to calm down, nothing is wrong but your stress ramps itself up to 10 instead.
Mental health is something that is looked down upon in this country. It’s not like a broken arm or chicken pox that you can see on the outside. It’s buried within peoples' brains, deep within the gray tissue that no one can see and because of that, it is easy for others to cast doubt on what you are feeling, even though it is really no one’s business to have an opinion on.
For me, I deal with this day-to-day and what makes it worse is that I am an extrovert as well. I can not count the times I’ve heard "but you’re such a happy person! there is no way that you have anxiety!”
Of course these people are never there when I’m having an anxiety attack and hyperventilating from getting a “we need to talk” text message from a loved one. No one is there when I start to wrack my brain to figure out what I could have possibly done wrong to make these people mad at me, when in all actuality, they have amazing news to share with me.
They weren’t there when I was in school and would worry myself to the point of being physically sick because there was something I wanted to avoid that day. It could be a person, some kind of confrontation or something as minute as a test that I didn’t feel prepared for, but I would end up either staying home or getting sent to the doctor because my nerves were all balled up inside me.
These two parts of myself are on complete opposite ends of my personality and they are at war within me. On one side, I love to see people, hear their stories and hang out with my friends. On the other hand, all I want is to stay curled up in my bed, eat snacks, read books and nap inbetween. I feel safe there and I can ignore all the things that worry me so much.
That is honestly why I love to write so much. It gives me a chance to talk to you guys but takes away the face-to -face interaction that I get so nervous about.
I am also a lucky person because I have friends who know and understand that I have an anxiety problem. They know that there are days that I don’t want to be around others and I need them to leave me alone. There are other days when I want to be in the middle of everything. They also recognize the signs that I am getting overwhelmed and will tell me to slow down or to take a break.
At the end of the day, anxiety and being an extrovert are both dominate parts of who I fundamentally am. One without the other would mean I wouldn’t have become the person I am and who I am going to be one day. Although I may wish that the anxiety was more under control, it is still there and I will continue to work on managing it.