After being officially diagnosed with generalized Anxiety Disorder with Depression tendencies over a year ago, I quickly learned that attempting to “white knuckle it” was no longer an option. Once you speak out loud and accept that what you have been enduring your entire life isn’t normal, your brain suddenly loses patience with your stubbornness. Realizing what my brain responds to and what it dislikes has been a truly eye opening and beautiful process. I’ve been introduced through social media to an entire universe of people who suffer with anxiety & depression. After much personal revelation and discovery, I came to the beautiful realization that anxiety isn’t trying to cause us pain, our anxiety is trying to protect us from being hurt or humiliated again. This simple thought made me have compassion towards my anxiety. What I am about to share with you all is a struggle I have had for a few years now that I have never verbally talked about to anyone except my mother. But today, I felt inspired and determined to talk about it. Because nobody should feel ashamed for something that renders them powerless.
When my anxiety first presented itself about 2 years ago, I had just moved away from home and across the country, to an exciting place where I knew nobody and didn’t even have a job set up. My anxiety was released in a way similar to Pandora’s Box being opened, it was messy. The ONLY way my brain could cope at the time, was to begin pulling my hair out. Strange, disturbing and odd are accurate emotional responses to this kind of news. But, when you put into account that my favorite relaxation method back at home was for my mom to brush my hair and play with it, this all makes sense. I would love to say that after 2 years and all the work I’ve done to manage my anxiety, that the hair pulling would have stopped. Unfortunately, it is an uphill battle, if I get stressed I relapse. This is an all too common reality for those who suffer with anxiety. This is the exact reason I am speaking about it, I felt ashamed and guilty for so long until I learned that people all over the world with anxiety cope this way. When I have bald spots appear I feel so much shame and feel like I am unworthy of the world to see me this way. I do my best to hide indoors so the world doesn’t see my “disgusting habit”. But what I have had to realize, for the sake of my sanity, is that when my anxiety gets really bad, and my brain is short circuiting, and the world is spinning all around me, pulling my hair out is the way my brain has learned to relieve stress in that moment. Now that my anxiety is manageable, I have begun to incorporate other stress relieving exercises like yoga, deep breathing, and coloring. Nobody is perfect, we all know that right? Wrong, we refuse to admit to ourselves that we are not perfect. We are still improving and that is what life is all about. Each day, each hour, each minute, we are improving. So, take a deep breath, look around you, and acknowledge the beauty and growth you have done. Admitting this struggle of mine might not seem like a huge accomplishment from the outside, but emotionally for me, this is a giant leap forward to healing the scars left from the road bumps of life. Be gentle to yourself, our Heavenly Father knows that we are very imperfect beings with a lot of work to do before we reach “perfection”. And if someone as unconditionally loving and knowledgeable as our Heavenly Father can accept that truth and be willing to help us on our journey, surely we can cut ourselves some slack once in a while. As Russel M. Nelson of the Quorum of The Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints stated in his 1995 talk, ‘Perfection Pending’….
“We all need to remember: men are that they might have joy—not guilt trips” – Russel M. Nelson
When my anxiety first presented itself about 2 years ago, I had just moved away from home and across the country, to an exciting place where I knew nobody and didn’t even have a job set up. My anxiety was released in a way similar to Pandora’s Box being opened, it was messy. The ONLY way my brain could cope at the time, was to begin pulling my hair out. Strange, disturbing and odd are accurate emotional responses to this kind of news. But, when you put into account that my favorite relaxation method back at home was for my mom to brush my hair and play with it, this all makes sense. I would love to say that after 2 years and all the work I’ve done to manage my anxiety, that the hair pulling would have stopped. Unfortunately, it is an uphill battle, if I get stressed I relapse. This is an all too common reality for those who suffer with anxiety. This is the exact reason I am speaking about it, I felt ashamed and guilty for so long until I learned that people all over the world with anxiety cope this way. When I have bald spots appear I feel so much shame and feel like I am unworthy of the world to see me this way. I do my best to hide indoors so the world doesn’t see my “disgusting habit”. But what I have had to realize, for the sake of my sanity, is that when my anxiety gets really bad, and my brain is short circuiting, and the world is spinning all around me, pulling my hair out is the way my brain has learned to relieve stress in that moment. Now that my anxiety is manageable, I have begun to incorporate other stress relieving exercises like yoga, deep breathing, and coloring. Nobody is perfect, we all know that right? Wrong, we refuse to admit to ourselves that we are not perfect. We are still improving and that is what life is all about. Each day, each hour, each minute, we are improving. So, take a deep breath, look around you, and acknowledge the beauty and growth you have done. Admitting this struggle of mine might not seem like a huge accomplishment from the outside, but emotionally for me, this is a giant leap forward to healing the scars left from the road bumps of life. Be gentle to yourself, our Heavenly Father knows that we are very imperfect beings with a lot of work to do before we reach “perfection”. And if someone as unconditionally loving and knowledgeable as our Heavenly Father can accept that truth and be willing to help us on our journey, surely we can cut ourselves some slack once in a while. As Russel M. Nelson of the Quorum of The Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints stated in his 1995 talk, ‘Perfection Pending’….
“We all need to remember: men are that they might have joy—not guilt trips” – Russel M. Nelson