Sometimes, when I’m just sitting there, alone, my heart hurts. And not the emotional "my heart hurts" but the physical, because I actually feel pain. And this, my friends, is the product of living a little too long with anxiety. The anxiety should have been gone at least six months ago, but it’s still here, and it plagues me. It makes me question everything, from my relationship to my friendships to my life choices. It makes me not want to talk to Pete or my mom, something that I still don’t understand, and if it were up to me I would be holed up in my apartment, only leaving for food. Obviously that’s not the answer to the problem, and since I know this logically (and also don’t have the same freedom as I did to drop all of my classes, now I have a job) it’s something that I don’t do.

Over dinner at Bongo’s with Pete on Friday, I realized that somewhere in December I let my voice slip away from me. My thoughts and feelings about things were always clear, but after December, I lost my voice. Fear took over without me knowing it. Fear of a lost relationship, the realization that my actions do have the ability to affect things, and the fear that I was not good enough.

My head knows that all these things are not true, but now that I know where the anxiety is coming from, and the big push towards marriage is stemming from, I can begin to heal.