The Worst Part Of Anxiety Is The Way It Makes You Question Your Worth
The worst part of anxiety is feeling like no one would ever want to spend forever with you. Even when you have a partner who has said and done the right things from the start, you will come up with a million reasons why they will eventually leave you or cheat on you. You will get paranoid about what they’re doing behind your back, even though they have given you absolutely no reason to stop trusting them, because you can’t understand why anyone would pick you over all their other options. Your lack of faith in yourself can cause troubles in the relationship that don’t need to exist. But you can’t help your feelings. You can’t turn off your self-doubt. You are faced with the option of either pretending you’re perfectly fine and shutting them out – or admitting how scared you are and potentially offending them. It feels like a lose-lose situation. It feels like your anxiety is making it impossible for you to win.
The worst part of anxiety is wondering why other people are wasting their precious time putting up with you. You can’t understand why your friends would want anything to do with you, which makes it hard for you to accept invites out with them or even text them back in a timely manner. Even though they clearly want to spend time with you, you feel like that can’t possibly be true and find yourself pulling away. You trick yourself into believing that they don’t actually want you to show up at their parties. They don’t actually want you to send long messages that they will feel obligated to respond to. Even though they genuinely do care about you, you can accidentally end up ruining the friendship by not reaching out to them and not spending enough time with them. Although you think you’re saving them the trouble of dealing with you, you’re really disappointing them over and over again.
The worst part of anxiety is missing out on opportunities that could have changed your life, all because a voice in your head warned you that you were never going to succeed, that you were going to embarrass yourself, that you were better off staying home and hiding. Although you want to put effort into your dreams and want to take a chance on yourself, it feels impossible on the days when your anxiety is the highest, when it’s a struggle to roll out of bed, let alone go out into the world and take such a huge risk. Your anxiety fools you into believing that you have no right to ask for more, that you need to accept the way things are right now is the way they’re always going to be. But that’s not true. You have so much potential. You have so much to offer partners and friends and the people in your workplace. You just need to remember that your anxiety is wrong. You can handle so much more than you think – and you deserve so much more than you have been settling for.