"You have anxiety problems? So what, everyone does, you just have to learn to handle stress. I don't know why you're complaining, it can't be that bad." Possibly the single most hurtful thing someone has ever said to me. It made me feel small, pathetic, and weak. As if I wasn’t strong enough to get through life like everyone else. It made me feel angry, what right did they have to judge me?

I would do almost anything to be able to walk in their shoes, to live without the at-times-crippling anxiety I faced. To them, anxiety was butterflies in their stomach, was feeling nauseous before a test, sweating palms when asking out someone that they had a crush on. I felt those things too, it's not as if I didn’t understand where they were coming from. To them, that was all that anxiety was, nothing more and nothing less. They had never experienced attacks. Never dealt with the feeling of a total loss of control, never had to pull over and have someone else drive their car because they could no longer drive safely. My anxiety leaves me tearing at my own arms in a nervous attempt at relieving the pent up stress. Leaves me unable to properly communicate, stumbling over words, grasping at coherence, and having it slide through my fingers like water. My anxiety drags me down into the cool waters of depression, where it feels as if I am slowly being crushed beneath the weight of my fears and responsibilities. Left me where my gaze lingers far too long on a knife, on a ledge.

My anxiety has kept me in the choking embrace of a walking depression, trapped behind a fake smile while I screamed for help inside, where no one could see how bad it truly was for me, not even my family. The thoughts of, its just stress, everyone deals with it ringing throughout my head. I was weak, and I couldn’t afford to show that weakness to anyone. It was my failing, and I had to deal with it. These were my thoughts for much too long, until my own hypocritical words broke me out of my melancholy. I told a friend who was struggling through the pain of losing a family member to seek out help if they couldn’t handle their grief. Who was I to try and tell them ask for help, when I so vehemently denied it myself? I couldn’t face them with that thought running through my head; I decided to finally confide in my mother. She was horrified to hear how about how much I had been struggling. She helped my find a counselor, and I could finally get the help I so desperately needed. I came to understand that there was nothing wrong with needing help. I was not weak, but rather strong for admitting that I couldn’t handle it myself.

Despite knowing this, that person had managed to cut me right to the bone with their thoughtless comment. Ignorance is not always bliss. It can be worse than any wound, as all it takes is one comment to set a person back by months, even years in facing their demons.