My anxiety comes in waves. I do not have a constant episode every second of every day of my life. When I do have episodes where my anxiety spikes, it's usually in the middle of the night and for no reason. Occasionally, I will have episodes that last an entire day or maybe an entire week. My point is that my life is not legitimately filled with constant anxiety. One of the most important things that I'd like people to know is this: Just because I have anxiety, that doesn't mean I'm depressed or even suicidal for that matter.

When you look up anxiety in a search engine or on social media, you often find that it is linked to depression and suicidal thoughts. I understand that a lot of the time, the two conditions are linked together. However, this is not the case for me. I suffer from anxiety, but I also love life most of the time. I would be devastated if I knew that I had to cut it short. I try to enjoy every part of my day- even though it is challenging most of the time.

I spent most of my high school career in a constant state of anxiety, I felt as though I never had a break from it. Every morning I would wake up for school and automatically be in a state of anxiety and every night as I went to bed, it would worsen. As my senior year came around; I decided to make a change. I wanted to go for the weekly workout routine, eating better and genuinely try to be more optimistic every day. Obviously, that did not work. However, I ended up changing the way I went throughout my day in little ways.

I started to hang out with friends more, even if I didn't want to at the time and I am grateful for doing so as it improved my overall mood dramatically and I had more people to talk to when I needed support. I changed my eating habits from snacking on junk food the whole day to having three, well-established meals at generally the same time. I drank the right amount of water that I need to. I also worked out randomly as I was never able to truly force myself to create a fitness plan and stick with it.

Through my freshman year of college, I decided to create a ten-year plan. I know that my next three years are going to be spent in Nursing school and I know where I am going after that. I know when I want certain life events to happen and I've talked those over with the people who matter. Having events in the future that I am excited for truly benefits my outlook on life and moving forward with it.

In order to move forward and clear the stigmatisms about mental illnesses, we need to be open about them. As a society, we need to clear the idea that openly discussing the struggles that we go through daily as neurodivergents is taboo and should be kept in secret, behind closed doors, not even being discussed in the family. People who struggle with mental illness need to come forward and share their experiences in order to bring them out into the light.