I am an anxious person. I have pretty much always been an anxious person, and I will probably always be an anxious person. It’s something I don’t really like to talk about, but not talking about it doesn’t change anything.

Before delving into my anxiousness, I want to make one thing clear. I don’t have anxiety, which I think is hard for people to disassociate being anxious from having anxiety. In my opinion, it’s kind of like the difference between being depressed and having depression. Everyone gets depressed, but not everyone has to deal with depression. Everyone gets anxious sometimes, but it doesn’t mean their anxiousness is as extreme or as frequent as someone’s who suffers from anxiety.

As a result of not having anxiety, I’ve never gone on any sort of medications to help me with my anxiousness. Instead, I’ve kind of developed my own coping mechanisms, even though some of them weren’t intentional and are kind of strange.

For instance, I’ve always done this thing when I’m stressed or anxious, which is that I rock back and forth while sitting. I know it’s weird, so I try to only do it when I’m in the privacy of my home. However, sometimes I would be nervous for a test or something at school, and I would accidentally start rocking. I’ll always remember the faces and snickers that this one girl made when she caught me rocking, but even in that moment I knew she would never understand, and trying to explain it wouldn’t have been worth the effort.

I learned an important lesson that day, which is that people who laugh at people who are obviously anxious, stressed or upset aren’t worth anybody’s time. Trying to seem “put together” in order to impress these people is a pointless act. They didn’t care about me, so why would I care about their opinion of me? In that moment, I did what I needed to do to help me because I care about me and about how I’m feeling.

Even though I experienced anxiousness in high school, I used to be more stressed than anxious, but I think it has reversed itself now that I’m in college. In high school, I used to be more worried about everything that I had to get done and about being “perfect.” Now, I’m just happier overall, am at a school that I love and have new friends that I really care about, and I get worried it’s not going to last. I just worry I’ll lose it all somehow.

I lay awake late at night thinking about everything I have going for me and about how it could be gone. I’ll admit, it causes me to have the occasional panic attack, but I usually just feel “off” for the most part.

I have this one friend that describes having the same sense of feeling “off.” She says, “I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I made a mistake.” I think that’s why I worry things are going to take a turn for the worst … It’s because I feel like I did something wrong even though I didn’t do anything at all, which is an idea that kind of sums up anxiousness pretty well.

Nowadays, I can more openly admit that I am an anxious person. I don’t like to talk about it because there’s a stigma against being anxious, but I’ve learned there’s nothing actually wrong with it. People think that anxiousness is a flaw even though almost everyone experiences it at some point in their life. What matters is that we figure out how to handle being anxious in order to prevent it from controlling our lives, and I think starting a discussion about it is the first step to achieving this better quality of life.