If You Can Love Me Through My Anxiety And Every Worry, I’ll Probably Love You Forever

 Ashley Graves
Ashley Graves

You’ll have to accept this without understanding it.

Understand it’s not going to be obvious when something is bothering us. A lot of people with anxiety try and hide the fact they have it. You won’t see how tired we are because won’t tell you we only slept for three hours that night. We won’t tell you that a fight with someone completely ruined our day. You won’t see our heart racing or our palms sweating when something isn’t going according to plan. And the thing that is bothering us most, might not be talked about because it’s sometimes scenario in our mind.

You won’t hear the stream of questions on repeat in our heads but for us, it’s an everyday thing.

You’ll have to listen, knowing sometimes there isn’t a solution.

When most situations and problems are things made up in the mind that only sometimes come to life, you’re going to have to do a lot of listening (if we trust you to tell you.) Listening as situations going from bad to cataphoric is the reality to us. Sometimes there is comfort in someone just being beside us as we play the waiting game of will this happen?

You’ll have to give your opinion when the ‘What Ifs’ creep in our mind.

It’s the overanalyzing of every look, every text, every word and every situation. Because all of these things keep us up at night. It’ll be conversations full of screen shots and reading between the lines because to us, nothing is as it seems. We’re always overthinking things.

You’ll have a reassure us sometimes and counter our doubts.

We will worry to a point where it will tire you out. The phrase, ‘It’ll be okay,’ can never be used enough.

Because in our mind, there’s this voice that tells us every worse case scenario is coming true. It’s inaccurate conclusions that lead to utter destruction. It’s phrases on repeat like, ‘That person isn’t answering because they don’t like you.’ or ‘You’re going to fail or get fired for this.’

It’s being hyper aware of everyone and everything to a point where you’re overcome with insecurity.

It’s being emotionally exhausted and a lot of people might not understand that phrase but for people with anxiety it’s a part of everyday life.

You’ll have to love us in the moments we don’t love ourselves.

It’s the moments we excuse ourselves from something because there is another thing we need to take care of and if we don’t, it’ll be on our mind until we fix it.

It’s the moments at 3 am where if you called us we’d be awake just laying there staring at the ceiling. Our brains don’t shut off.

It’s in the moments we completely break down because something didn’t go as planned and you’ll have to be the one keeping it together.

It’s the self-criticism and overcompensating and trying too hard. It’s loving you in a way we should love ourselves but we’re still learning how to.

You’ll have to be our strength sometimes.

In the moments we fall flat on our face, we’ll pick ourselves apart and judge ourselves with a ruthless lack of forgiveness. You’ll have to be the one telling us it’s okay. No matter how big of a mistake we made, tell us we’ll get through it.

Tell us it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to not have gotten everything done. It’s okay something didn’t go according to plan. And we do hear you but sometimes we don’t believe it. Moments of failure or letting someone down completely turns us into someone we aren’t.

In those weak moments forgive us for that too. We don’t like people seeing us vulnerable. We don’t like feeling like some burden.

We are our own worst enemies and forgiving ourselves for things takes a lot of time.

You’ll need to tell us when something is wrong.

If something is wrong, tell us. Don’t give us time to think about it. We’ll lose our fricken mind doing so then create ten more problems. We’re programmed to overthink everything and in doing so, sometimes we create solutions to things that aren’t even problems, to begin with. The truth is we just want to make things right.

You’ll have to accept apologies even if it’s for something silly.

An unanswered text might lead to three others then us running over details of something you might have missed. All the while, you simply took a shower and didn’t bring your phone with you.

It’s apologizing for things that haven’t even crossed your mind when our reality is simply hoping we didn’t do something wrong or we didn’t hurt you.

If you love us, we’ll love you even more.

People with anxiety care. We care more than we want to. We’re more sensitive than we’d like to be. But the root of anxiety is a heart that genuinely means well and never wants to intentionally hurt someone.

Through acceptance and love, it might not make this thing go away but you’ll have someone who is loyal and treats you better than anyone in your life. While the fear of people leaving dictates our life, if you stay with us we’ll return the favor and there won’t be a person who loves you more.
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Writer living in Hoboken, NJ with my 2 dogs.

Keep up with Kirsten on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and kirstencorley.com

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