When I talk badly about myself…

Last month there was a trend on TikTok where people would start with that line and follow it with a picture of themselves as a child and caption it, I’m talking badly about them, too. As someone who thinks a lot about my past and how my undiagnosed anxiety clashed with the expectations of the people I grew up around, this trend was catnip for me.

I never actually made my own TikTok with this trend, but I still think about it a lot. I think about how my view of myself and my emotions and my mental health has changed so dramatically over the past few years, and how I'm able to work through negative thoughts without believing them.

When I was a kid, I was really hard on myself. I called myself stupid on several occasions–I still get a little emotional when I think about that girl. The girl who thought so little of herself that she was willing to tear herself down to the point of tears. I don't know why I started doing that, or when I stopped, but even with the small amount of language I had for my emotions back then, I knew it wasn't a healthy view of myself.

I've written on here before about the symptoms of my anxiety that went unnoticed for years, and I still think a lot about how other people's responses affected how I saw myself.

Maybe I was too emotional. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe there was something wrong with me.

So I started bottling everything up. I was still a very emotional kid, but my emotions would only spill over when I was overwhelmed with feelings and didn't know what to do with them. Anger, sadness, and frustration equal tears. Always have, probably always will.

I became such an expert at hiding my feelings that I didn't even realize that's what I was doing. I had to be feeling things, I cried all the time!

Apparently it's not that simple. So, when I started going to therapy for the first time at sixteen, I began the process of emptying my bottle of feelings.

As a matter of fact, I owe the bottle metaphor to my first therapist. I'll never forget what she said about me holding in my feelings. “One day”, she told me, “Your bottle is gonna break. I think it already has.”

She was right, it had. I was going through a traumatic medical experience at that time, as well as my new anxiety diagnosis, and it was a very difficult time in my life. My feelings had nowhere to go but out.

I've always known I wanted to be a writer, and when I was younger I also knew that I wanted to write about my experience. This was long before I had my anxiety diagnosed, but I knew, deep down, that I was struggling. I was having a hard time explaining my feelings, my reactions, my personality to the people around me. I wanted other people to know that they weren't alone.

Everything I do to advocate for mental health is for that girl. I wish I could travel back in time and show her this blog. I wish I could tell her she's gonna be okay.

Unfortunately I can't do that, so instead I'll keep working to love myself for who I am, anxiety and all.

I hope you join me on this journey.

–Abbie