hello anita,

thank you for taking the time to listen and break things down with me. you are also spot on.

i have suffered from clinical depression and anxiety from a young age due to childhood trauma. (family and constant but not my parents) i was anxious to leave my hometown because i come from humble roots and wanted to pursue greed in the big city. i had become rebellious and was a major risk taker so i followed my impulses that began to steer me wrong, around the age of twelve. i was nineteen when i left my hometown. my father and i fought hard and loud, all the time. my mother was distant and did not know how to handle my hormones or attitude. i hated my (wonderfully awesome now) parents so i left to pursue my own world. in reality, my whole family has depression and anxiety. we’re not jerks we just didn’t know how to communicate but that ingrained a lot of insecurity in me.

then i became a raging alcoholic in the new city. i dated abusive men. i learned how to verbally fight back. i hated myself. so i drank some more. the anxiety and depression were ten times worse than when i was just a shy kid with butterflies, or an overly confident hormonal teen.

when i came back to my hometown, things were great. i could start over. but then i realized that sobriety is more than just putting the drink drown and i was suddenly very aware and sensitive to all the horrible things at once. peoples true colors were once drank away and vented about. now i had to learn how to not be anxious and fit in without alcohol to boost my “confidence”. i couldn’t find the way to communicate in order to land a job for a really long time. so then my anxiety told me i was nothing, not nearly as intelligent as i once thought. i humbled myself in the most painful way possible, to the extreme.

long story short, and i’m sorry i went off track – yes, anxiety has followed me my whole life. from that shy child who never knew how to speak up, to that rebellious child who took the wrong route, to the sober girl just trying to keep my job and some normalcy and structure to my life. even though i hate normalcy and structure but it is what pays the bills. that’s what my anxiety tells me.