Let me be clear — the story I am telling you today is the story of a child, a young adult, navigating a world too expansive to comprehend. If you think you need professional help, by all means, seek it out.

Last year, I wrote a column titled ‘a confession from me, to you,’ in which I described how I’m an anxious introvert, how I overthink everything, how I feel like my behavior at my job is a performance art. But since then, I feel like something’s shifted. Let me tell you about it.

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I don’t know when I started feeling anxious, but I know when it started getting bad. I was in seventh grade, and I slowly started feeling… weird. One day, before taking a big test, I looked at myself in the mirror and knew deep down that I was more nervous than I should have been, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it in hopes that the feeling would go away.

It didn’t.

That winter, my strange nervous feeling got so bad that it was all I could think about most days. I read a book with my mom that said that you should let the feeling wash over you and not fight it. Supposedly, it helped a lot of people. It didn’t help me.

My therapist at the time asked me to draw a picture of how I felt. I drew a black mass, jagged, tendrils, spikes of red, emanating from my stomach and jabbing, creeping upwards, into my rib cage, into my throat, into my brain. This was me, and there was no me without it.

The winter passed, and I started to feel a little better. My days were defined by how well I could contain the feeling in my stomach. Some days were better, but none good — the mass never left.

As I have got older, a lot of my anxiety has been characterized by irrational fears that snowball out of control. When I was a junior in high school, I was deathly afraid of reading out loud in my history class because when I got nervous my voice would shake. My obsessive thoughts started with a simple glance at my teacher’s desk at the beginning of every class period to see if there were handouts we would read. As the weeks went on, it got to the point where every night, the idea of reading in class would lurk in the back of mind and manifest into a deep-seated dread in my body. I couldn’t shake it.

I think most, if not all, of these feelings stemmed from a lack of control. My fears consumed me in middle school and sat with me in high school. As I grow older and puberty and the hormones involved become a receding figure in my rear view mirror, I feel less of that powerlessness and need for control — but I think there’s something else at play here, too.

My freshman year of college, I had a revelation — well, more like a conscious realization of a gradual shift in my thinking — that the quality of my days doesn’t need to be measured by my lack of anxiety. The physical feeling of anxiety is more or less always present in my body, if only a small amount, and I’ve had some really great times while it’s there. It feels a lot less like a chaos monster I’m battling on the daily, and more like an old friend.

As I've gotten older, I’ve gotten better at acknowledging and contextualizing my irrational thoughts. As a teenager, I think it’s really easy to think that the world hates you and everything is bad, but the older I get, the more nuance I see. Most people are focused on themself and trying to get through their own life, and probably aren’t giving a second thought to the weird thing I did at lunch. It’s OK if my brain thinks that everyone hates me, but I can recognize that it’s likely not true, and that it really is all in my head.

I want to write a part two to this column, about how I stopped caring about what people think of me so much. It was a pretty fundamental shift in how I think, and it’s hard to tell this story without telling that one. So until next time, lovely readers.