Traveling With Anxiety

If you haven't got a clue what it feels like to have anxiety, then I'll try to explain it to you the best of my ability. It's constantly thinking that everyone is paying attention to your every movement and judging you for it, even if no one is paying you any mind at all. It's having an extreme wanderlust but being too afraid to leave your bedroom. It's getting asked to go do something with your friends last minute and declining because changing the daily schedule that you already had planned out would be enough to make your head explode. It's constantly apologizing and feeling guilty for everything, even for things that are out of your control. And for me personally, it's doing something wrong or making a mistake and hating when someone thinks I'm disrespectful or a bad person.

Now as you may have guessed, traveling alone with anxiety is almost a form of torture. You're constantly sitting there thinking about all of the things that could go wrong while panicking because you forgot to tell all of the stewardesses thank you. It's constantly apologizing profusely to all the passengers that you accidentally bump with your bag. It's wondering if sitting with your neck pillow on while you're awake is considered strange or if the person next to you noticed that you picked apart your airplane style dinner. Not to mention the never ending fear that you might have a panic attack in public.

As you assumed, all this worrying can be quite exhausting, but I have developed some ways to ease the anxiety, if only just for a little while. Now, these are just what works for me, if you have anxiety, you may have your own strategies to calm yourself down.

1. The first thing that I almost always do is either text my mom or my boyfriend about anything and everything, except my anxieties. It helps me to keep my mind off of everything that I had been worrying about, as well as reminding me that there are people out there who love me no matter when I wear my neck pillow. 

2. Lists, lists, lists, and more lists. I make lists for just about everything. I even make lists within lists. It calms my nerves to check things off.

3. Another thing I enjoy doing, is SnapChatting my cousins because I know that they will always, ALWAYS cheer me up when I am not feeling the greatest. 

4. Especially when I'm around large groups of people, I almost exclusively have my earphones in, whether I'm listening to music or not. Now for me, listening to the soft, sweet voices of the five most perfect male specimens on the planet (*cough* One Direction *cough*) almost always makes me feel better, and if it doesn't, then I know that something much deeper is wrong than just anxiety.

5. Lastly, I really enjoy scouring Tumblr for poems or quotes that relate to how I'm feeling at that moment and copying them down into my journal in different fonts with different doodles. I also sometimes write poems and other stuff of my own. Because of my anxiety, it's almost infinitely impossible for me to talk about my feelings or emotions out loud with people. When I try, the words get stuck in my throat as though they are the princess in a dragon guarded tower and it won't let them escape. So, I like to think of writing as my knight in shining armour. (Even though I'm an independent woman that doesn't need no man).

I really hope that this will help somebody out there at least come up with some ideas to work through your anxiety on your own as well. Or maybe my writing this was utterly useless and in that case, I apologize for wasting your valuable time. Cheers!