Imagine living in a box.

A box that's only three feet by three feet, barely big enough for you to take a full step inside of it, not even big enough for you to move your arms around.

Now imagine that box is glass.

Imagine living in a glass box, barely big enough for you to move around it. You can see outside the box, you can see people moving around freely, having fun, living their life. But you can't. And now, imagine if you do move, and it's the wrong move, alarms go off constantly, letting you know the mistake you made.

Can you picture it? Can you imagine the sheer terror you would feel? The constant state of panic you would be in, worrying about a wrong step or a wrong arm movement? Can you imagine how debilitating that would be?

Well, that feeling is how I feel every day.

I don't live in an actual glass box, no, but at times it feels like I do. I live in the metaphorical glass box of anxiety, which in itself is a paradoxical feeling. The box looks and feels as though it'll protect you, and for a while, it seems like it is. But after a while of looking around, you realize that no one around you is living in this box. You realize no one else is worrying about every step they take, no one else is going to great lengths to not make a mistake. The box is a lie. It looks and feels as though it protects you, and maybe it does, but it also paralyzes you, terrifies you, makes you scared to move.

Anxiety is a paradox. You feel like by being terrified of everything, that you're somehow shielded from pain, shielded from hurt, shielded from the terrors of the world. You feel like it's protection from anything. But at the same time, anxiety terrifies you. It makes you scared to do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, make the wrong move at the wrong time in the wrong place. And if you do something that your anxiety perceives as wrong, alarms go off in your head for hours, days, and weeks. And you can turn them off.

The glass box of anxiety is debilitating. You will never be as free as the people you can see outside the box. The people saying what they want, doing what they want, being themselves freely and not worried about what might happen. Your mind constantly tries to tell you that these people are living wrong. That they're going through too much pain. That their life hurts. But they seem fine.

When you live in that box, there's no way out. There's no door that you can just open, no windows, no secret trap door that lets you escape it. Your brain was wired to build this box around you, and you're trapped. All you can really do is try to work around it. Try to tune out the alarms that sound at your every move. Try to ignore the box and move how you want anyway. It's hard, but that's how life is.

The glass box of anxiety will never disappear. You just have to learn to make the most of it.