Asking for understanding.



My friend Lee wrote this impassioned plea. 
Clinically diagnosed anxiety is not just being a bit worried, you can't just "chill out a bit" or "get over it".
It eats into your wellbeing, your confidence, your health, and your life and it is 24/7.
When someone cancels, or ducks out, or makes a pathetic excuse, please understand that it isn't personal, it isn't laziness, and it isn't being rude. It's because they can't physically do it.
When someone needs supporting/encouraging/ hand holding it isn't pathetic, it isn't attention-seeking, it isn't childish - it's because they are desperate to beat it but can't do it alone.
Anxiety sucks, being isolated and believing your friends don't care sucks even more.
How many of you have had a night out planned, or arranged coffee or a beer with friends and suddenly the 4 walls you inhabit seem the only safe haven because it's the only place you don't have to pretend you are ok, so you cancel.
Or when you are invited out you tell them how terribly sorry you are, but you're already booked up that weekend when you are actually just really busy holding it together in your safe box.
So the first problem starts, all by itself.
People stop asking you and the isolation that at first wasn't true becomes your only truth.
Please don't give up on your friends. Ring them if they don't reply to a message. They really do want to talk, they just don't know how to say it some days.
And in work every passing comment is a negative, you constantly do more to get over the feeling you are not good enough.
The exhaustion from not sleeping because you panic all night over what you cannot influence means you make mistakes, you live in a fog and it is a vicious circle.


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