When Anxiety Makes You Afraid of What You Love

I love writing, yet I fear it. I love being outside, yet I fear it. I love being around people, yet I fear it.

I’m trapped in my fear of fearing something, and I fear I won’t be able to get out of this cycle. The more I think about it, the more I feel my skin crawling. I can’t tell this to anyone else — who would understand? If I do this they usually say, “Oh, I am so sorry, it will get better.” It doesn’t feel that way. It makes me want to scream. Fearing something may be something they can work through, but even if I rationally know this isn’t something big, it isn’t something I can get over. My anxiety controls me and I get even more depressed when I think about how others may see me.

Even now just writing this I feel trapped in my cycle, my chest tightens and I just want to hide. I read others’ stories and think how I am not good enough. I think back to my childhood of attempts to write and how I hide those stories because I feared being rejected because my stories were not good enough. That if I tried to my authentic self, others may think I am just an odd, “messed up” person.

This is what fear is to me. This is what my anxiety feels like to me. A tightening ball of rubber bands being wrapped around each other making it hard to breath.

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