Living With Anxiety | Personal Blog

 This post will delve into some heavy subject matter. If you are easily triggered by mentions of sexual harassment/assault, please skip this. It's not my intention to make anyone uncomfortable, merely to express my own experiences in an outlet that is helpful for me. Back in September of 2021, when I was 15 years old, I started dating someone online. I will refer to them as "SO" for simplicity. They were 16, roughly six months older than me. We were both around the same mental maturity. Something I did not know about at the time was that, a fact that I would discover later, I had OSDD/DID. In simple terms, this means I have multiple distinct personalities with their own preferences and memories. It's not easy to know about something like DID at a young age. It has even taken some people 40-60 years to discover it. Something I have learned about DID is that separation in preferences means that dating becomes HARD, if not straight-up impossible. As far as I remember, th...

 This is more loosely based on anxiety, and rather just part of my overall mental health struggle. I will get into anxiety has been involved later on if I remember to. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, as I will be calling it) is something I have had to do a lot of research about lately because I have recently seriously considered that I may have it. I am aware it's an extreme diagnosis that can't just be tossed around like a warm towel, but I am rarely as certain about somethings as my mental health. With an asterisk, of course. DID has a lot of confusion around it so, based on my intensive research, I will give you an explanation. DID is a disorder that starts due to childhood neglect, abuse, and/or trauma. It cannot form in adulthood because it begins while the brain is still in early developmental stages. It causes a person's personality to split into multiple parts as a way to cope with trauma throughout their entire life. These parts are oft called "alters...

 This will be a bit of a different entry. For context, I am 19 and currently in college. I had to experience the entire public schooling system (besides one year of private schooling) up to this point, from Pre-Kindergarten up to my Senior year of high school. I live in the USA and have done so throughout my education. If you want an idea of the average(?) Gen Z American public schooling experience, this will be your chance to learn. Prepare yourself for a detailed recounting of some of the most hellish years of my entire life. Chapter One: Preschool (AKA Pre-K). I began preschool when I was either 4 or 5, I can't remember. I went to a school with only two teachers that educated students on how to speak basic Spanish, as well as English of course. That was the main thing I remembered about preschool education. I learned how to count to ten in Spanish and still retain the knowledge to this day: uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez. We also got the opportunit...

 I've gotten myself into quite a pickle. I've pretty much had this idea planted in my head that I shouldn't tell my parents things about myself because I feel they will get too worried and overreact. Which, I argue, is mostly not a bad thing. But somewhat recently I had that idea challenged. I have a very strong suspicion that I have autism. I have not been diagnosed because, for reasons you will find out soon, I'm afraid to ask to see a psychiatrist. But I've done a lot of research on autism. I've watched videos on people describing their experience with autism and I've related VERY heavily. I find myself struggling and getting tired in social situations. I hold myself back from doing or saying weird things, making me look stiff. I imitate others' behaviors. I stim, A LOT. I get hyperfixations, bad hyperfixations. I couldn't maintain eye contact if my life depended on it. I'm reserved. I take things way too literally. I experience meltdowns. I h...