Blogging My Way to a Solution

The thing that finally loosened the grip of my anxiety was other people who were living with the same thing. Early on, I was convinced the problem belonged to me alone. Back in school I would watch the popular kids with a kind of hunger. They ran the group events. They volunteered first when a speech was due. Teachers knew them by name, parents liked them, everyone wanted to sit near them. I wanted to be one of them for years, and because I never was, I sank into a lot of self-pity.

College did not change much. The girls who moved through a room easily, warm and sure of themselves, made me ache just by being happy near me. I decided somewhere in there that I was worth nothing, a waste of a student. After I graduated I took a job at a call center, where strangers from every corner of the world shouted at me down the phone, hour after hour, day after day. I despised it, but I had no idea what else I could do. My friends were few. My parents, I was pretty sure, had written me off a long time before.

Around then I also gave my heart to a man who took what he wanted and walked off exactly when I had nothing left to hold onto. I was out of hope and scrolling job listings to keep the lights on when I came across a figure online: roughly six million Americans deal with a panic disorder, and about forty million live with some form of anxiety. The number stopped me cold. All those people, carrying the same weight I was carrying. My whole life I had wanted one person to really see me, to say out loud the things I felt and never named. Reading that, I understood I was not the only one, and I wanted to find these people and talk to them.

So I built a blog for people with anxiety. I had years of things pressed down inside me, and they came out across page after page. I wrote without hiding anything, and I asked whoever was reading to do the same. Within days the traffic climbed. We traded our fears, our low stretches, the ugly thoughts, the ordinary difficulties of getting through a week. People described how they had clawed their way past their own anxiety, and those accounts helped all of us.

Once I had done that, the old sense of being lesser than everyone else drained away. I was proud, actually, to run something that was doing other people some good. It felt like I already knew each person who had posted about their anxiety, as if we were related. We checked in on each other's days and kept filling in the history of where anxiety had tripped us up before. Even now, when I say what I am feeling to someone, I come away from it feeling connected rather than stranded on my own.

We worked like a group, trying one anxiety-lowering method after another and comparing notes on what shifted and how far we had come. We talked frankly about the medications too, how they might help and what the side effects could do to you. Because I finally had people to think out loud with, I worked out what actually fit me. A reader suggested therapy, so I went, and it did a lot of good. I took up breathing exercises and meditation to quiet the fear and build some calm. Another reader pointed to caffeine, so I cut back, and that trimmed the edge off things further.

I stopped handing anxiety the keys to my life, and I started feeling a real duty toward the people who read me. I wanted to be the proof that it could be done. Blogging turned into full-time work, and that alone did wonders for my confidence. I dug into what helps and passed along the methods I found: meditation, yoga, sports, prayer, movement, and the rest. When readers wrote back frustrated that something hadn't worked, I told them to give it time, because changes this big do not land overnight. We are dealing with the mind, which is one of the parts of us that most needs training and gets the least of it, so bending its habits takes real patience.

Every time someone wrote to tell me the blog had helped them break free of their anxiety, I came away lifted, and it got easier to picture my own leaving me. I have also pointed readers toward books on positive thinking and self-management, which many of them say made a difference. What this whole stretch taught me is plain enough: giving and helping eases my pain and theirs at the same time, and the good of it lands on both sides. Does that really surprise anyone?