Anxiety.
Even the word makes me feel anxious.
Breathless. Tearful. Panicky.
And I’ll be honest, until last week I thought anxiety meant being a bit of a worrier. A bit prone to what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. Not very good at pulling yourself together and thinking positively.
I know.
That was before I spent four solid days crying and ended up in my GP’s surgery begging for something to make my mind stop racing and my heart stop thumping in my chest so hard that I thought it might actually explode.
I’m sorry to all the mums with anxiety who I didn’t make enough effort to understand until now.
It’s bad enough battling debilitating, catastrophic thoughts that invade your mind and body at inopportune moments throughout the day without warning, like waves of fear that totally engulf and threaten to sweep you away.
But what’s almost worse (if anything could be) is the feeling that you can't explain how you feel because people might just tell you that you’re being irrational, or that the thing you’re fixating on is never going to happen.
That's not the point.
And I now realise that there's no bigger feeling of failure than not being able to find your happy place when you’re with your kids. You want to feel normal, you long to make it back to where you were before the anxiety robbed you of everything you’d taken for granted.
You feel you owe it to your kids to be that easy-going mum you used to be. You worry that you’re damaging them in some way with your anxiety, which only heightens the waves of worry, of course.
But even in the grip of anxiety I know that being unkind to myself is only going to make it hold me all the tighter.
So here’s to going easier on ourselves.
To taking the meds (it’s the brave thing to do, not weak), to forcing the smiles until they eventually start to feel less fake, and to treating ourselves with the kind of compassion we’d show our kids if they ever felt anxious.
I get it now. So this one’s for the anxious mums. There are more of us here than you think. You’re not alone, it’s not your fault, and we can get through it.
In fact, we will.
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