At the beginning- what I consider the starting point to finding my peace of mind

"I would have never guessed you had anxiety issues" 

I didn't think I had anxiety issues either. But then I'd have these moments where I felt so overwhelmed, I had to stop what I was doing because my chest tightened, I felt dizzy, and just really wanted to run home and cry in my bed. It'd be over something small and simple too like designing my experiments or learning about a new experimental protocol. Pretty routine stuff for a graduate student in a research lab.

I'd leave to take a break and after a half hour, I'd be fine. Sometimes.

There was also the obsessing. Over really small things, like I forgot to make some point on a presentation, or... honestly I can't even remember anymore that's how dumb they were. And I always knew that it was a waste of time and that I was getting worked up over nothing... but the over thinking would still last for at least a day.

I think we all do this to a certain extent, but for me it got to the point where I'd have an anxiety attack about once a week. And maybe that sounds serious, but it was more of an annoyance than anything. So I thought I'd just go check out the counseling services at the school and see if they could tell me how messed up I was.

Long story short, I went to the counselor for the entire quarter. I was initially really skeptical on whether I even needed to see a therapist (my life is going really well, I feel like I have no right to complain). But in the end, he really helped me in understanding what was triggering these emotional responses and how my self-defense mechanisms (using humor to mask the pain, rationalizing how I "should" be feeling) were actually hurting me instead of dealing with the real problem.

I'm no longer going even though I still deal with anxiety. There are always going to be new triggers and I don't think it's something that will ever really go away. Only now I have the tools to work them out and it's amazing to me how much I've grown as a person.

And the most surprising thing out of this whole experience was, once I started sharing with my friends that I was having these issues, I found a lot of them were going through something similar. Before that, I had thought there was something wrong with me and that I was one of the few people having to deal with this.

But the truth is, we can all be "OK" and still have issues.




Note: originally I was only going to post once a month... I'll probably start slowing down later. But I just wanted to share that my next post will be about how I've been taking acting classes for over a year and how that's also been really therapeutic for me as well!