I wake up every morning just like everybody else. I do my hair, brush my teeth and get dressed. As I walk to class, my peers who pass me see a put together girl because my hair is straight and I am wearing a skirt. But what they can't see is the pit I can feeling forming inside my stomach as I avoid eye contact. They can't hear the voices in my head telling me I am not good enough to belong at Connecticut College. My peers have no idea that I puked in the bathroom minutes earlier because my ex-boyfriend sat too close to me in the dining hall. People assume that if you can not see it, then it's not really there. You can not see anxiety, you can not smell it and you can not hear it, but you can feel it.

I learned to push my feelings so far down until I believed they weren't there. I learned how to put on a smile and go about my day without a soul knowing something was wrong. I learned how to not show my emotions, so that I wouldn't have to talk about it. So that no one had to talk about it.

I have anxitey. I can feel my hands start to shake as I rub my fingers together as if the answer to my problems was going to be found in between my knuckles. I readjust my hair and my shirt as if my clothes is what is making me go numb. I can not think, speak or function. I get so lost into the thoughts running through my head, I do not even know what I am thinking out about. Sometimes I am not thinking about anything. I can see a person, or a picture and instantly need to run to the bathroom to vomit. I run and hide so that no one else has the bare the sight of me shaking, crying and losing all control of my body. Anxitey can happen day or night, rain or shine.

Anxitey doesn't care who you are, where you are or who you are with. It doesn't care what your background is or where you are going. It doesn't care how it affects you or the people around you. Anxitey is relentless, powerful and intense.

What anxitey needs to know is that I am going to fight back. I will not let the dark thoughts that swirl in my head define me. I will fight the demons I face everyday and put on a fake smile until the smile isn't forced. I fight to get myself out of bed, to and from class and every little part of the day that anxitey thinks it has a hold on. I will not let anxitey win. An illness does not define me, it is just a part of me.