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Anxiety Lili Leier I have always been quiet and introverted. I prefer to sit back and just watch everyone else. But at one point, it felt like everyone else was watching me instead. When I was fifteen, I felt like everyone was constantly judging the way I walked, talked, looked, or breathed. Every time I walked down the hallways at school, I kept my eyes glued to the ground. Maybe if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me. Maybe they would ignore me. I would shift from thinking about not making eye contact, to overthinking about the way I was walking. Were my steps too big? Were they too small? Was I stomping? Was I swaying oddly? All of my attention was on how I was walking. I hyper focused on how different muscles were moving. And then I forgot how to walk. I never once walked through those hallways comfortably. I was never truly comfortable in general at school. I was most uncomfortable in my speech class. Giving a speech was one of the worst things I could possibly have to do. Everyone's eyes would be on me. Everyone would have to listen to my voice. I remember giving my first introduction speech to the class. An easy ‘get to know me’ speech. But in reality, it was one of the hardest things I had to do. My hands were shaking, and my heart was beating out of my chest before I even stepped in front of my peers. I began overthinking every single word in my speech. What if my speech sounded dumb? Then the whole class would think that I was stupid. My mind was racing through every bad outcome. It felt like my entire body was shaking inside and out. I sped through the speech, hoping to finally be able to sit back down and hide my face. It turned out that I had talked so fast that my sevenminute speech was compressed into a three-minute speech. And my final grade was not very good. You spoke way too fast, I could barely hear you, you didn’t make eye contact with the class once; those were the critiques that I received from my teacher. I did two other speeches in that class before it was too much for me to handle. I panicked and stayed down in the counseling office for most of the semester. I hid. It was easier to hide than to constantly feel like I was being judged. And eventually, I started to feel the same way towards my other classes. It got to the point where I couldn’t make myself go to school. I started falling behind in my classes. I hated myself and the fact that school was so stressful for me. I thought that it would be easier if I switched schools. I spent a lot of time looking at other schools. In the end, I decided that it would be so much worse to be the new kid than the quiet kid. So I picked myself back up and went back to school. I tried to be more easy going. I couldn’t control other people, but I could control myself and how they affect me. Looking back at those moments, the hiding and avoiding made everything so much worse. I’m finally at a point in my life where I realize that I don’t need to please everyone. I just need to be happy with myself. I shouldn’t care whether people are looking at me. It is hard to switch mindsets. But I think that one thing that helped me was joining my high school drama club. I remember my friend, Shyanne, begged me to join.
