Anxiety With a Capital A.

I feel like generally, with any blog, you're supposed to have some sort of about me. For reader engagement and why you have a blog in the first place.

My name is Beckett, I'm twenty-two. I go to a small school in the middle of Michigan. I major in English, minor in creative writing, I like to write poetry and novels and blogs, my parents are scientists, I love to travel. I want to move to England. I wish I had long curly hair and I buried a really big piece of my heart in York Minster Cathedral. I'm the type of girl who would put that in an about me, that I buried my heart in a cathedral.

But what a lovely cathedral it is.

What I don't say when people want an introduction to the ambitious Beckett Marsak is this.

"Hi, I'm Beckett, and I suffer from Generalised Anxiety Disorder."

But I want to say it, I want to scream it, so that people actually understand how my life works.

When I try to describe GAD, I always find myself rather speechless, so I'll let my blogging idol, Jenny Lawson, describe it for me.

"It's become my experience that people always assume that generalized anxiety disorder is preferable to social anxiety disorder, because it sounds more vague and unthreatening, but those people are totally wrong. For me, having generalized anxiety disorder is basically like having all of the other anxiety disorders smooshed into one. Even the ones that aren't recognized by modern science. Things like birds-will-probably-smother-me-in-my-sleep anxiety disorder and I-keep-extra-crackers-in-my-pockets-in-case-I-get-trapped-in-an-elevator anxiety disorder. Basically I'm just generally anxious about fucking everything."

People have a tendency to think that anxiety isn't a real thing, that it's just needless worrying. That, to me, is a very dangerous mentality, because there is nothing more real to me than when I am afraid to leave my apartment for no apparent reason, but the idea is so terrifying that I sit in my room and cry. 

The other week a really cool band came to perform at my college. A half hour before the performance, I was hit with an anxiety attack so severe that I threw up and was afraid to leave my bedroom. By some miracle of god, I managed to leave my apartment and I ventured to the venue to hear the band perform. While I was there with my friends and co-workers, I was laughing and joking and talking spiritedly about what kind of merch the band would have.

Inside, I thought I was going to physically drown. Every single thing outside of my bedroom was terrifying. 

this may or may not be me.

When you have GAD, a lot of things start to look like mountains. Leaving your apartment. Going to the cafeteria. Calling a business. Talking to a store employee.

Most people see these things as little things. Like Legos. Legos are little and can be stepped over.

People like me see these things as mountains. As my therapist calls them, "Big, terrible mountains."

Yep, that's Mt. Everest to prove my point.

At my last appointment with my therapist, we discussed the steps I'm taking to get better, which currently involve "seeing big, terrible mountains as victories." I called a business yesterday, victory! I went to the cafeteria alone, victory! I left my apartment when I was afraid to, victory! Not a terrible mountain, a victorious growing experience!

I told her that was all well and good, but my biggest and growing concern was that my anxiety was going to keep me from getting everything that I wanted out of life. This has been a growing anxiety that I've had for a good two years and it makes me physically ill at least once a week. 

I am terrified that I will be too afraid to ask for the help that I need. I am scared that I will simply sit back and let all of these opportunities slip away from me because I am too scared to pursue them. 

That's why I have this blog, to be perfectly honest. So I can write about all of my struggles, all of the Mt. Everests that I'm too scared to climb, but I'll climb them anyway because I have to write about them. I can sit down next week and write, "Well today I went to the career planning office and I learned about this particular grad school, and I was so anxious that I threw up all over my new dress and I didn't leave my apartment for ten hours afterwards, but I did it, and it's a good grad school."

I am not the only person that feels like this. Sometimes it feels like no one else is afraid of everything, is terrified of the small things, no one else can't comprehend what life would be like if I didn't worry about every single thing on the planet, but I'm not the only person. And I want to write about it so other people understand and so other people can relate.

Yesterday I made an important phone call and I saw it as a victory and not as a big, terrible mountain, and I think that's progress.

So I'm still inching to England, and anxiety with a capital A is coming with me. But hopefully by the time I get there, that anxiety will just be something that I can deal with, not something that governs my entire existence.