Personal Narrative: How To Control My Anxiety

I am Aeris Jelks, and I almost let my anxiety control my grades. My anxiety is so intense it stops me from going to new places, trying new things, and meeting new people. Over all, it holds me back from living life. Not many people truly understand how it feels being afraid of life. Not few people would understand the experience of taking two whole weeks to work up the nerve to ask for a less anxiety inducing alternative to getting my grade. Most people would not understand how a service learning project could cause me so much distress. Most of all, people would not understand how it took going through a mental breakdown to finally reach out for help. Thanks to one person’s understanding, I am now in therapy, learning how to control my anxiety. …show more content…
Depression was taking over more and more of my mind and high anxiety turned into a daily event. Regardless of how I was feeling about myself, and the process, I went to appointment number two anyways. At this appointment, my counselor wanted to take a more fun, yet structured approach to our meeting. This is the first time she tapped into my artistic side, she never let it go after that. The activity was to scribble randomly without purpose for three seconds, then make that scribble into a drawing. There were three total drawings, and I then had to use those to make a story. My story was oddly dark, darker than what I would expect myself to put forth. My story focused on people pretending about who they really are, and hiding themselves till they grew up and the charade was too hard to keep up. It took me a moment of rereading to realize I was writing about myself. Time ran out for this appointment at the stoke of this realization, it was the most saved by the bell moment I have ever experienced. For our upcoming week, our schedules did not align so I was given homework instead of a traditional meeting. My homework was to draw my anxiety, I had to put my fears to paper. Over the week I completed a piece that initially gave my anxiety to do, but as the week went on it aided in helping me …show more content…
Grades, did not care. Work, did not care. Honestly, I felt manic, it was odd to me that this period of low was followed by this period of high, or in my case not caring. I had never thought of myself as being bipolar before until this week. I know it is a possibility that everything I was learning in class was getting to me. That is why I asked my therapist to diagnose me, or give me a DSM test, to avoid me self-diagnosing myself. As a psychology major I feel like this is a hard thing to avoid, we learn all these new terms and it is challenging not to label ourselves when something sounds so familiar to our personal experiences. My therapist would not diagnose me that day. I believe my energy level shocked her. During all of our other meetings I had been so leveled headed, but this meeting was different, I felt wired. I was ridiculously uncomfortable throughout the whole hour and very much wanted to leave the room. I remember shaking constantly and not being able to sit still. Midway into the meeting I shut down, it was hard to get any conversation going after that. I know this was more harmful to me than good, but the idea that she was going to take away my carefree mood scared me. Because to me, at that moment not caring was better than overly caring and being sad. One of the most significant moments of this day