How I Feel Right Now, Anxiety, Friendship, etc.

I never used to think of myself as an anxious person. I always spent a lot of time thinking about things – or over thinking things, but I didn’t really connect it with anxiety until recently, probably around the time I started school.

I’ve always been anxious about any kind of interaction with other people. When I was younger, I was painfully shy. Then when I was about thirteen, I became a bit more…outgoing, if that’s the right word. I was less shy, but still just as anxious. The difference was that I became more eloquent, and I became more able to express my opinions. This resulted in people actually seeing my personality, seeing the real me, and being a bit…daunted by me.

The decision to go to school was perhaps the hardest decision I have ever made. But the key point is that I made it. Nobody told me to make that decision; I made it completely on my own. And I’m glad I did, I honestly am, but it was terrifying. I had thrown myself in at the deep end, without knowing how to swim. For the first week I sort of floated, and then I rapidly began to sink. I don’t think it was really till about January that I began to feel like I was finding my feet.

But even now that I’ve been there for more than eight months, I still feel like an outsider, like an alien. I don’t belong, I don’t fit in.

 I’ve always felt like people didn’t really want to be around me, and that affects how I interact with people. There are girls at school who I would consider myself to be friends with, but I’m always worried that they might not consider themselves to be friends with me.

Every time I go to sit with my friends in the lunch hall I worry that perhaps they don’t want me to sit with them, every time I stand with my friends at break time, I worry perhaps they don’t want to talk to me. And I’m sure that my worries are unfounded, but that doesn’t make them any less of a reality for me. When you believe that you are annoyance to people, it doesn’t matter whether or not you actually are.

I’m sure that if I told my friends that I feel like this, they’d be horrified. But I don’t tell them because I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining, and I know that if I’m miserable all the time no one will be around me. I often feel that when I am myself, people don’t want to be around me, too. I feel that I’m too outspoken, too passionate about obscure things, that I inhabit a world so vividly my own that nobody quite knows how to respond to me.

The reason I was thinking about anxiety today is because my exams started on Friday. My first exam was History, which is the subject that I really want to get a good grade in. History is my second best subject (English is my best) and I want to get an A in it (I’m currently at a B) but I was panicking because a) it’s my first exam, b) I felt like I hadn’t revised enough, and c) who doesn’t stress about exams?

The night before the exam I was practically having panic attacks and whispering repeatedly ‘Oh my god, I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail.’ I wanted to talk to someone about it, I wanted someone to reassure me, but I felt that I was imposing upon people by complaining to them about how I felt. In the end I texted my friend, because I couldn’t just keep it all inside, I couldn’t just panic on my own. In the two or so minutes it took her to reply, I felt like “Oh my god, why did I text her? Why would she want to talk to me?” and then she replied and she said she was feeling nervous about the exam too, and that made me feel a bit better.

As luck would have it, the questions on the exam were about things I had revised for, and so I think I did alright (though my History teacher believes that the grade boundaries get higher each year because they don’t want too many people getting good grades, so I might not have done as well as I think I did).

This morning I had my first English exam, and I panicked a bit, but not as much. When I got into the exam hall, I sneaked a look at the questions (which we’re not meant to do until we’re told “You may start”) and I just sighed with relief, because they were the best questions I could have hoped for. The question on The Crucible was about the changes in the character of John Proctor, and given that two of my coursework essays were on him, I know his character inside out, and there were a multitude of things I could write about him. For Of Mice and Men (a book which I absolutely loathe) the question was something I had done in class two weeks ago, and so I knew what to write. Therefore, I have hopefully not failed (though whether or not I fail English Lit also depends on the Analysing Poetry exam on Thursday, which is my Achilles heel in terms of English – okay, I’m not that bad at it, but I’m on an A for everything else in English, but probably a B/C for this).

The lesson I have learnt in terms of anxiety and exams is that they’re not going to be half as bad as I think they are (though I have another History exam on Friday that I could still screw up) and that wasting my time worrying isn’t going to do anything but make me feel worse.

However when it comes to anxiety about people, I think that it runs too deep for me to just get over. No matter how many times I find reassurance that people think I’m an okay person, I still don’t believe people truly want to be friends with me. I then feel like I’m being a drama-queen attention seeker just because I feel that way, and that my entire existence is an annoyance to people.

And because of my anxiety, I find myself deliberately making myself lonelier than I would be, because I remove myself from situations where there is a chance other people might not want me.

And then there are times like today, where I make a big deal out of something that is nothing. So in Biology today, I found out that we have to decide which tables we’re all sitting at at prom – as in, who we’re sitting with. And this made me panic, because what if no one wants to sit with me? What if my friends would rather I wasn’t there? And this thought spiralled in the way such thoughts always do, and I ended up feeling very miserable.

I guess the reason I’m writing a blog about this is because I need to vent. I feel anxious about these things I’ve mentioned, practically every day. There are times when I don’t feel as anxious – half way through my exam this morning I had this moment of complete peace and clarity. Then I realized it wasn’t half way through the exam, it was three quarters of the way through, and I’d barely written anything about Of Mice and Even More Mice (the title I think would suit it so much better) – and there are times when I feel even more exceptionally anxious, and I just dissolve into misery.

There is only one person who can stop me from feeling this way, and that person is myself. Otherwise, I – like John Proctor – will become the instigator of my own demise. (I mean, obviously I’m not going to hang for witchcraft because my name is more precious to me than my life, but you get what I mean. I will bring about my own downfall because I can’t overcome my fatal flaws. I will end up a tragic hero rather than just a hero. Not that I am a hero, but…well, I’m going to stop this line of thought before I compare anything else to The Crucible).

The only way I can fight my anxiety is to take risks, to push myself so far away from my comfort zone that I won’t look behind me, I won’t look back to safety. Because our comfort zones don’t comfort us, they just make us miserable. So I’m going to follow in the footsteps of another tragic hero – Tris Prior – and I’m going to be brave. And to me, bravery isn’t doing something heroic, something that beats the odds and saves the day. To me, bravery isn’t even speaking my mind, because I can do that just fine, even if my heart is in my throat when I do so. It’s the tiny things that are bravery for me, things that are just insignificant nothings to most people, things they wouldn’t even think were scary. To me, bravery is asking my friend if she wants to meet up outside of school, because asking her that means I am going far away from my comfort zone. Even though I know she won’t say no, I’m scared every time, scared that perhaps she’s changed her mind about wanting to be friends with me.

And perhaps it’s our fears that define us; perhaps it’s our nightmares that make us who we are. And maybe that is morbid, maybe it is terrible, that our lives are dictated by that which we fear. But what is fear other than extreme vulnerability? Vulnerability is what makes us human, it’s what makes us who we are, and vulnerability teaches us our greatest lessons. But we can not learn unless we take risks, and ultimately, we must pick our battles. Real life isn’t like Divergent; we can’t put all our fears into a simulation and face them all at once. We have to find the thing that means the most to us, and we have to fight for it wholeheartedly, because some things are worth fighting for. And for me, the thing I am prepared to fight for is friendship, because I’ve read enough books to know that even the bravest among us can’t face life alone.

But we can’t just focus on the things that terrify us; we must also focus on what makes us happy. Sadly, in my case, the things that make me happy are also the things that make me sad; my greatest desire is my greatest fear. All I want is to have strong, solid friendships, because I am at my happiest when surrounded by other people, but that is also where I am at my most vulnerable.

I sometimes find it hard to think of even a moment when I was truly happy without feeling out of my depth. However, I have found a picture of one of those times. This is me with Boris, one of the guinea pigs that my school’s Science Department owns. I think you can see by my face just how happy I am. Animals are so much easier than humans...

And lastly: to my friends, if you are reading this (which I’m 98% sure you’re not). All this…school, friendship, everything…it’s new to me. I don’t know what I’m doing; I don’t know where I begin. It’s like I’ve left the world I know and been dropped onto another planet. I’m scared out of my mind because I feel like I’m going to screw everything up. And I can’t do this on my own, I just can’t. I don’t know how to be anyone else, so the only person I can be is myself. And I feel inadequate a lot of the time, and I feel like I’m not really worth anything, and that you’ve all been best friends since you were eleven and that I’m just this imposter that doesn’t fit in anywhere. And perhaps I don’t. But if I do, and if you do genuinely want me around, let me know. Because it’s horrible to feel so out of place all the time. People always ask me why I’m sad even when I’m happy, as if I look sad all the time, and perhaps I do. But see past that, please. See past my façade, past all the walls I’ve built up around myself. Because I’m okay sometimes, I’m an okay person, and I’m not half as weird as I sometimes act. And the only reason I seem like I’m holding back is because I don’t want to impose on you.