This Is How To Not Let Anxiety Defeat You

It was not until a friend mentioned it, I would not notice that I have been keeping up with this positive attitude for quite a while now. I promptly agreed with her but I cannot fully fathom how I managed to stay on the brighter side. There are plenty of times when I think about why I am feeling just plainly fine when there are hundreds of things to worry about. I should have been questioning my career path, my relationship with the people around me, my separation anxiety with my family and friends, my self-inflicting issues, all those things. I mean, if you’d want me to I can jot down in a list all the reasons to frown at myself. I can surely dread every morning I wake up and cry myself to sleep. I have all the valid reasons to, but I chose not to.

Don’t get me wrong. With all these unfortunate things I am dealing with, I can attest that I had a breakdown phase while it was all just starting. I was completely lost. I was in crisis. I was so unsure of a lot of things and decisions that I’ve made. I even isolated myself from the most important people in my life. They may be missing a person but daaang, I was missing a lot of people. I miss all of them. I was pretending to be okay even if I was not. I was kind of depressed, struggling to cope up and adjusting myself in a new place with strangers—people who know just my face. Everything was so new and I was practically unfamiliar with a lot of things.

I was literally thrown in the pit with nothing in my bare hands. People who know me in a personal level may know why I was struggling, but if they don’t that’s because I kept it bottled inside. And I know that is the hardest thing—keeping every feeling boiling inside until it burns you from inside out. It sucks.

Until one day, as magical and as impossible it may sound, I started to feel better. This is probably because I got tired of looking down on myself and drowning in the ocean of sorrow and sadness. I learned how to swim. When you’re stuck in a sea of nothingness, you don’t swim against the wave you swim with it so it would not drown you. Instead it might help you get into the shore. Believe me it really works. While I was almost giving up, I realized that some bad things have to happen before good things can. If I surrendered, I’m a loser—and I hate losing. I hate losing when I know I could have done something else besides giving up. I learned that there are only two ways in dealing with problems: thinking positive and staying negative. It dawned into me that I’ve been so pessimistic for a while and it never really worked. It got me nowhere so I thought of trying the other way and be optimistic. Or atleast try to.

Finally, I am seeing things in a new perspective. It will take me few more months to completely get over my problems but now I feel so much better. My problems will not go away as quick as I want them to but I now see them differently. Yes, I am still struggling with separation anxiety but lonely is the last thing I can describe myself. I fervently became more grateful of all the countless good things that have happened in my life which I blindly ignored because I was wallowing in solitude. I wanted to be happy, so I chose to be and now I am.