When Anxiety Tells Me Everyone I Love Will Leave Me

Living with anxiety for me means living every day with the constant worry that everyone in my life who means something to me will one day up and leave me. It means needing to insistently talk to and interact with everyone in my life. I feel like I am holding a bundle of helium-filled air balloons, and the more I talk to someone, the tighter my grip on the string gets, and the less likely they are to get away.

Yet, life and experience have taught me this is the exact thing that makes people want to leave even more. The more I smother and pull, the farther away they get. My constant insecurity of being alone drives me to push people out of my life. Now isn’t that ironic?

I’m scared to be alone because that means I will be alone with my thoughts — the worry and the constant running to-do list that will never be finished. My anxiety makes me high maintenance, and there is nothing people hate more than dealing with someone who is high maintenance. It is exhausting, I have to live with myself every day.

This downward spiral of not wanting to be alone has gotten to the point that if I don’t talk to someone every day, I have accepted the fact that they hate me and have rid me from their life.

However, reality has taught me people just get busy — for days, weeks, or even months at a time, and that doesn’t mean they don’t love you anymore. You don’t need to talk to someone 24/7. It’s smothering. My goal is to start living in the moment with myself more.

My goal is to try and start controlling my anxiety and channeling it in different ways than tethering myself to everyone around me. I want to be able to let myself fly away sometimes. Let myself worry but talk it out with me. I want to be able to start troubleshooting my own problems and trust myself to be alone again. I want to be able to enjoy being alone, entirely and solely in touch with myself and how I feel. I’m hoping this will start to allow me to trust others more and believe in myself.

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Thinkstock photo by rubatos