It is a sad but common occurrence that when we try to look at mental illness from the inside, we romanticize it. We paint sadness as a pretty picture of dark colors and hopeful undertones. It’s important to know that it’s not always like that, though.

This is a hard article for me to write. In writing it, it means opening up doors that previously I have left closed so the world could not see the truth. And the truth is that there is always a part of me that I try to keep hidden away; a monster in my closet I never want to acknowledge. The monster is my anxiety, and the severe disorder I fight battles against every day to function like a “normal” human being.

I don’t talk about it because everyone assumes to know what it’s really like, therefore closing their minds to the possibility that it could be something different. Something much worse. But due to recent events in my life, I felt as though maybe beginning to open up about my story would service me as a benefit, and maybe help others to understand that anxiety is not what so many people paint it out to be.

I was diagnosed with sever generalized anxiety disorder at ten years old. While the other kids would listen to the D.A.R.E. officer on Fridays, a therapist would listen to me. I was always a really shy and really sensitive child, but I think everyone just thought it was cute until it got scary. It’s one of those things that I can’t ever really remember having a definite starting point, because now it’s almost like I can’t remember not feeling this way.

I’ve been in and out of the therapist’s office three other times since then and switched daily antidepressant medication once. I said that because it’s important to remember that mental illnesses don’t have just one fix-all treatment. They’re a personalized disease. And just because someone like myself has the ability to maintain a high functioning type of anxiety, does not make it any less severe. Just because the world doesn’t see the pain doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

People who know me don’t look at me and see the constant storm in my head. They don’t witness the blackout panic attacks or the chest pains from having to talk on the phone or the pushing back of tears when I make a silly mistake in front of a stranger. They can’t feel my heart race when I don’t put my money back in my wallet fast enough after checking out at the grocery store, they don’t hear me sniffle when someone tells me they don’t understand what I’m saying, they don’t see the stress hives I hide under my clothes when it all becomes too much. They don’t know about the withdrawals I had when I stopped my old medication, they don’t know about the side effects I had when I started my new one.

What I’m trying to say is that people romanticize this sickness into something cute and quirky. They pretend that what others choose to show them is all there is to see, and while ignorance can be blissful, it’s also dangerous. Somewhere along the road, we started to depict anxiety as butterflies in the stomach before a test and “Oh my gosh that homework assignment was so hard, I swear I had a panic attack over it last night because I didn’t think I’d finish it!” instead of the dark, twisted monster it really is.

Because while it’s not a beautiful boy wiping your tears away with his thumbs or crying in the shower or stressing about not studying for a test, it is getting so scared of the possibility of something going the wrong way that you vomit in your bathroom sink. It is falling out of your desk at school and blacking out because a panic attack slams you out of nowhere. It is the constant apologies to the people you love just for the way you exist. It is it’s own special kind of dark under eye circles and full body hives and bloody fingers from picking the skin away. It is that constant fear and irritation that no one takes your mental health seriously because anxiety is something everybody seems to have these days.

I can’t tell you how many seemingly mundane and simple everyday things I am genuinely uncomfortable and afraid of doing, but how often I do them anyway because there is always someone who is eager to step up and tell me how stupid it is to be nervous about it and the idea of that happening is almost just as terrible.

What I’m getting at here is that everyone is fighting battles you don’t know about. I hope that in sharing this part of myself I’ve given someone a reason to look at others through a different lens of vision. Those of us with anxiety know how silly we sound and how frustrated you can become by the things we are afraid of. Believe me, we know.

I think I speak for all of us silent warriors when I say that all we want is to be acknowledged and seen. We want the validation that what we experience is real, and we want to join in the fight against the stigma of mental illnesses, which is arguably one of the hardest fights of all. Getting an inside look into the head of someone living with anxiety every day was a means of shining a light on what it’s really like versus what uneducated opinions would like to have you believe. I hope you gained something from this, and remember that just because you can’t see the pain doesn’t mean it isn’t there.