I wasn’t sure at the time if it was an anxiety attack or a spell of some sort. All I knew is that there were so many people and so many thoughts in my head that made me want to crawl out of my skin. I ran to a hill and rested my head upon my knees, my hands ever so tensely grasped the hair upon my head. I started to pretend no one was there. I took one of my restless hands from my head and reached for a piece of grass. For a minute I focused on how the grass looked and felt in my hand. I held the blade of grass and felt every edge and imperfection it owned. I memorized the lush green color it displayed. Like me, the blade of grass was taken from its home and put into a world of loudness and worry. As the grass fell from my fingers to the ground below I came back to reality.

My mother and I realized that after this incident I needed to get help. I sat looking at my hands, the smell of antibacterial in the air. I hated being there, being questioned as if I did something wrong. My mother told the truth I did not want to bring myself to say. A word was said that I would come to hate: anxiety or the “A” word. “Yes, she can’t even bear to go out with friends or go to the mall.” My mind faded in and out of the conversation. “Yes, Alexis we are going to help you get through this, you see you have social anxiety,” my doctor said. This did not make sense to me as I am a talkative, outgoing person. These words made me feel lost, like I did not know who I even was, and at the same time everything started to make sense.

The times that I felt the pain of anxiety were in public places. All the times my stomach felt like it had been punctured by a hundred needles left to throb undeniably. Or before, those moments when I was younger and my face would burn and my eyes fluttering around the room trying to avoid eye contact. In these moments I needed to feel the comfort of someone I trusted to help me calm down again. I was pacing in the Los Angeles airport as the noise of a phone ringing echoed in my ear. Constant talking surrounded me, the rolling of luggage provided background noise. I called at what must have been 12 am east coast time when she picked up the phone I could hear the tiredness in her voice and I apologized for waking her up, the worry in my voice was obvious, she said: “it's alright.” “You will be alright” the words in that moment would not have meant anything if it weren't from my mother, the one that I trust.

I was then prescribed a medicine that would help. My mother was told to see if she noticed any positive changes in me. The next time we went to the doctor’s office she told him how I was doing. I never expected to hear what she said, “I can’t believe the difference, she went on a trip to California with her father.” My mother smiled as she talked. The way she talked showed that she was proud of me. For the first time, I did not look at my hands while the doctor talked, I was present in the moment.

Months later I sat in my living room reading my old journals (all from before my diagnosis). All the entries showed how my anxiety slowly increased over time. The first one is from the 7th grade “look at her and criticize the smile on the outside, but you’re really just piling on her in the inside” a poem I tried to write about exclusion. Then from my entries of the 8th grade, I express how nobody really understands me and how people constantly put me down. In the middle of my 8th-grade year, I wrote this “I stopped writing or talking about how I felt because” (the ending erased) and “I recently stopped hanging around” also an unfinished entry. The ending of these entries were erased because I did not want people to see what I was actually feeling. I did not want people to look at me as broken. Looking at these entries I realized that before I changed I was just standing there frozen and oblivious. If it weren't for the “A” word I may have never figured out the part of me that was missing. The part of me that is so truthful and telling, the part that makes me feel something. As I break the shackle anxiety is holding me by, I grow stronger and embrace how I feel.

Personally sharing my story makes me feel like I understand people better why keep something like this a secret when others may be going through the same thing and feel that they can not relate. A quote that I always think about is “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”― Wendy Mass, The Candymakers.