Anxiety and Journaling

First off, sorry that I haven't posted in a while. I haven't really had any ideas about what to post and I've had things to do these past two weeks.

For as long as I can really remember, I've had issues with anxiety in one form or another. When I was little, I would worry that my parents had died when they had left the house and been gone for longer than I had expected. I would worry about nearly every aspect of myself and whether people would want to be my friend or not. I was insecure and anxious at a very young age, and now that I'm 17 and living in the worst year ever, there are more real things to be anxious about than ever before, so I'm even more anxious about the things that I don't need to worry about as well.

Since March 19, I've left my house probably around five times, maybe slightly more than that. All the hours spent in my house have been filled with worry: about the pandemic, about school, about politics, about whatever else I can find it in me to worry about. The more real things there are to worry about, the more I worry about things that I shouldn't.

When life is normal, and I am in school and regularly leaving my house and doing things, I don't worry as much about as many things. Life provides me with easy distractions that occupy my time and my mind and prevent me from thinking that everyone secretly hates me or that everything I love and care about will disappear. When I'm cooped up at home, though, there's nothing. There's nothing to keep me from latching onto everything I can and interpreting it as something worth worrying over. There's nothing to keep me from theorizing about what people actually think of me or about what's going to happen to me when people I care about inevitably leave.

The people I care about haven't left, at least not yet, anyway, but my brain tells me that it's inevitable that they will. I hate feeling that way, but it seems impossible not to. I feel powerless and helpless and in constant need of reassurance. It makes me feel like I'm a burden on everyone who has ever made the mistake of caring about me. My brain tells me that I should worry, that there are things to worry about, and so I worry and never stop worrying.

I wish it would stop.

Maybe it will.

I've recently started journaling to try and relieve some of that stress and anxiety. At the end of the day, I turn off my phone, do my prayers, and write about what happened during the day and what problems I had. It's therapeutic to get all of those things down on paper instead of keeping them bouncing around my skull. It's therapeutic for me to be writing this right now, because I know that almost nobody will read it.

Journaling helps, but I just wish I could turn my brain off and stop thinking about all of the things that could go wrong. I wish that I could just relax and be happy with the fact that all those things that could go wrong aren't going wrong, but for my brain, anything that can go wrong will go wrong and probably already has gone wrong.

I think I'm better now than I was at my worst, which was in middle school, but I'm still not close to where I want to be. Hopefully I can get there.

Sorry, I know that this wasn't a fun read, and if you've made it this far I congratulate you. I hope that you are dealing with whatever problems you're going through in a healthy way, and I hope that you're okay.

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