As Someone With Anxiety, This Is How I Fall in Love

This piece was written by Kim Quindlen a Thought Catalog contributor.

As someone with anxiety, I fall in love the way many people do – instinctively, quickly, often easily. The only difference is while I’m falling in love, my brain is also coming up with a million different reasons why this is also terrifying and dangerous and so easily broken.

As someone with anxiety, I fall in love slowly. And with a strange sense of guilt, because of the thoughts that won’t shut up. The thoughts like, This can’t possibly last. This can’t possibly be real. This is too good to be true. Something’s going to ruin this at some point. 

As someone with anxiety, I fall in love while feeling a strange mixture of hope and dread. Hope — that I’ve finally found someone I can talk to, someone I can depend on, someone I can trust, someone who will maybe bring me back when I feel trapped and suffocated in my own mind. And dread — that I will not be good enough, that I don’t deserve this, that my heart now sleeps peacefully in someone else’s hands and could end up being shattered at any moment.

But as someone with anxiety, I also fall in love wholeheartedly.

I fall in love fiercely and absolutely with the commitment to something that is finally light and exciting and real. I feel scared, but certain. Out of control, but also lighthearted. I feel an immediate instinct to protect my person in every way possible with the knowledge I now care about someone else’s life more than my own.

As someone with anxiety, I appreciate the big stuff, but I fall in love during the little moments — quiet car rides, deep sleeps, telepathic looks in the middle of a boring party. I fall in love during reassuring conversations. I fall in love from hand holding that puts me more at ease on a turbulent flight. I fall in love during a Saturday nap and a breakfast date that is just a bagel on a bench and a weekend spent with a family that starts to feel a little bit like my own.

I fall in love during the little things because the little things make me feel normal. The little things with someone special remind me it doesn’t have to take much to bring me back from a dark night or a panic attack or a work meltdown.

As someone with anxiety, I fall in love the way many people do. I fall in love intensely and vulnerably and wholly. The only difference for me is getting to a place where I believe I truly deserve it.

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Thinkstock photo via Ivanko_Brnjakovic.