My anxiety and I are now best friends.
Hi guys, my name is Shagun Sethi and I’m 20 years old. I’m going to talk to you about a very important and huge part of myself — that is my anxiety. My anxiety and I are now best friends. It has been 6 years that I know my anxiety better than maybe anyone else would ever know anything. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and I got to know about it 5 to 6 years ago. I got my anxiety from a place of a lot of childhood bullying and a lot of violence that I faced. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is basically a state in which you feel constantly anxious. It is not about circumstances that make you prone to your anxiety but rather a state of being.
For instance, imagine this, do you remember that feeling when your foot has been in the same position for a really long time, you can’t move it because you feel like needles are pinning through your entire body, that’s what it feels like to have GAD continually. I constantly feel like there are needles poking through my body, I constantly feel like there’s something going wrong in the world. That’s just how my anxiety makes me feel.
Now let me talk about where I got my anxiety from, my anxiety comes from a place of childhood bullying and childhood violence. It comes from a place where I was beaten up, I was thrown around and I had to face a lot — for instance, alienation, boycotting and treatment like I’m an external, different person at school and at home from whatever circumstances that I was in, in my community, in my dance classes and stuff like that. My bullying was not just because of the kind of person I was but because of body shaming, because I was short, I had muscles and I was a little bulky. I was not your petite, perfect pretty girl and from those places, I started hating on myself because the way society is made, it makes you believe that everything that you do is wrong, it makes you believe that your existence is invalid. That’s what I started feeling, I started feeling that people don’t like me and that’s alright because there’s something wrong with me right. That I deserved to be beaten up because I mean why aren’t they beating up other kids? I deserve to not have friends and no one come to my birthday because I mean everyone else has friends go to their birthdays, so there’s something wrong with me. I was told I shouldn’t dance because of the kind of physique I had, I was told I shouldn’t be doing a plethora of things because that’s the kind of person I was right.
It took me a lot of time to realize that it because of these circumstances, that I had developed a hatred to myself and a fear of the world and this combination of two things is what we call Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It is because of these situations that I was in, that I realized that I couldn’t for instance, go abroad for my under graduation because I was not capable because I was too fragile, I was too scared, I couldn’t do basic things like go out and get myself coffee because I was scared of that interaction that would take place and so I decided, that if I was going to be able to change the world, I have to first know myself and change myself and so I started therapy. It was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever taken. But because of the therapy and the different changes that I made in my daily life, I reached a position and a place where first I can now talk to you about all I went through but also be and know myself. I know the things I need to do for myself, I know how to handle my anxiety and I know the do’s and don’t when you’re in a tough situation and so I want to tell you that whatever you’re feeling though it’s real and though whatever your feelings are, they’re real feelings and they deserve to be heard by the world, they aren’t the right feelings. You shouldn’t hate on yourself, you shouldn’t be made to feel like you’re smaller than what you are and that your worth is nothing because no one decides that, you do.
So you have to take positive actions, to move to a place where you can empower others by empowering yourself.
-Shagun Sethi
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