Understanding Anxiety

Anxiety is not something that just comes or happens out of nothing, it is actually a result of our previous bad experiences, it is born from our traumas. It takes its time to grow, you may experience trauma and think that you’ve moved on and you are okay, then suddenly one day it hits you and you realize you were never okay.

I experienced a lot of bullying as a kid, and it was painful. Little did I know that the experience does not only hurt, but it will fester and eventually give birth to anxiety. My bullying experiences taught me that people are mean, and they hurt other people, as a result fear of people was born. I think anxiety is our mind’s way of keeping us safe and away from the things that hurt us. Unfortunately, it tries so hard to keep us safe that it ends up being our prison, it ends up keeping us away from things that will not hurt us, it eventually keeps us away from living life itself.

You may not realize when it is conceived, but you definitely notice when it is born. It changes everything, it makes you prefer your own company to that of others, it makes you believe things that are not true, it takes away your confidence, it takes over your whole life. You become a prisoner to it, you become a slave to its lies, and you can either deal with it or remain a slave to it.

Dealing with it is not easy though, breaking out of prison is no walk in the park (that’s if we even do break out of this prison). I think sometimes we can only fight our way to the top office of the prison and take over and do things our way instead of trying to break out, because let’s face it, some of us will never beat anxiety, we just learn to live with it, we just find ways of dealing with it and its triggers. Living with it is also not easy, one day you feel like you on top of things and the next, you feel like a sinking ship. It's not easy, but this is how it is. We just learn to take it one step and one affirmation at a time.