What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is being locked out of your house, in the rain, while you are wearing shorts and a tank top with an umbrella nowhere in sight. It is having to knock on the front door, shivering as you wait for someone to answer and it feels like a lifetime before it opens up.

Anxiety is having your mom come with you to a doctor’s appointment, because you do not know how to explain to the doctor how you feel. They say your heartbeat is going a thousand miles an hour and they tell you to stand on the scale so they can weigh you, but you are afraid of the number you are going to see.

Anxiety is the fiddling of the rings on your fingers, needing to have something to play with, to distract you from it all. It is the picking at your nails and the pulling of your fingers. It is the biting of your nails and when worse comes to worse, it is the clenching of your fists as you dig your nails into your skin as rough as you can because you just need to feel something.

Anxiety is when you feel like you are standing on the edge of a cliff and you cannot back away, no matter how hard you try. In fact, you are moving closer and closer to the edge and you are just waiting for the drop.

Anxiety is being on a rollercoaster and it is moving so fast. It is going upside down and you feel like you are going to throw up, but nothing comes out of you. It is the closing of your eyes, heart racing, as you wait for the ride to finally end.

Anxiety is the feeling of being nervous before a job interview, except the job interview is not for another week. There should be nothing to worry about yet, you still have time to prepare, but the uneasy feeling stays with you.

Anxiety is being in the ocean. A big wave comes up and pushes you under the water and then another wave comes as you try to get back up, and then another wave comes after that. You finally get a chance to come up for air, and then another wave hits again. It is being stuck in the water, having no way to breathe.

Anxiety is the feeling of walking into a school hallway and everyone turns and watches you from all around. They all have something to say, an opinion they want to throw out about you and you feel panicked.

Anxiety is watching a scary movie. It is knowing that there will be a jump scare, at some point, but you do not know when it will happen. It is the jump scare finally happening, but then another one occurs when you are not expecting it.

Anxiety is a balloon. It is getting bigger and bigger. At some point, the balloon is going to pop, and you are waiting for the moment to happen, but it has yet to.

Anxiety is sending a text to the wrong person. It is a text about a certain someone and you accidentally send it to that person, but it was meant to go to someone else. It was not meant to go to the person it was about and there is no undo button.

What is anxiety?

It is the unknown, but there is one thing you can know about it;

you can know that you will be okay.