What It’s Like To Date A Girl With Anxiety

Some of my days are spent relatively normal: kept busy running errands, going to school, chatting over cold tea and cheap wine with friends and seeing you in the evening, the best part of my day. When I cuddle up to you before we drift off to sleep, I escape into a place where I can enjoy your company without distraction, where I can hear your heart beat and your soft breathing as I reflect on my day. Thoughts still regularly flood my head throughout the day of being inadequate and less intelligent than I would wish, but I’m able to easily dismiss them and their absurdity. These are my good days, where I think about the things that have happened and I can accept everything from the bad to the good. But then there are the hard days, and on these days no amount of cuddling or kisses can suffice enough to make me feel like you truly care about me and that I’m not just some annoying, needy girl that takes refuge under your arms every night.

I know you never lie to me about these incredibly sweet and sincere things you tell me to make me feel less anxious and all the more loved. In everything that you say and in the way that you hold me and at the end of it all, I really do believe you. But in the moment where my anxiety is running wild and attacking me from the inside I never think that I’m worthy of love, and certainly not of your attention and affection. No matter how much you hold me and tell me that I’m so great and that you love me, in my mind the voice that screams that I’ll never be good enough overshadows your affirming words. Don’t get me wrong, holding me and kissing me does help. Immensely. But anxiety always comes back within a few minutes, hours, or days. Even most medications are meant for the short-term.

These are my hard days. I don’t know why I have hard days and normal days at the expense of my anxiety, but sometimes I start my day waking up to look over to you, to wonder how you can be so hungry for life with so many interests and things to make your day worthwhile to you while I feel like just blending into the background of everybody’s life. I wonder why I’ve seem to lost the drive to do just about anything through the years and how I can get back to the place where I’m excited about things without the fear of failure or how you’ll see me if I fail. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the place where you are. You’re so carefree and driven towards the things that you love, and you’ll never know how much I want to be there with you. This is what constitutes a hard day, usually.

Sometimes I have hard nights. I know it’s difficult dealing with my sporadic anxiety attacks at night time, when every attacking thought I’ve had throughout the day comes to surface in the darkness of your room. I shake and cry while lying on your chest with your arms around me when it gets really bad, and this really does help me more than you’ll know. You do the best you can to hold me and to tell me that it’s all okay, and you even do your best to understand what causes these changes in thought and liveliness from day to day, but you’ll never fully understand like I do. And as much as I want you to understand me as a person inside and out, I never want you to fully understand my anxiety. I never want you to wake up and wonder why you don’t care about things like you used to and if your family and friends actually like spending time with you.

You’ll never understand what it’s like to quiet your emotions and viewpoints even though you want to scream them because you’re afraid of what people might say and think. I want you to never understand because I never want you to go through the hard days like I do. I want your bad days to be bad and your good days to be good, but to wake up in the morning and start again anew and maybe, hopefully, create our life together where we have these together through the years. On these particular days I want to let you know that when you recognize that it’s a hard day and you wrap me up in your arms despite all of my mind’s attacks on a desperate attempt to comfort me are the days when I love you the most.