By: Adelina Perez
This week I will be going in depth about my journey with anxiety and how in the last two years, it has changed. Everyone has a different journey which creates a plethora of different stories to be told. This is just one that maybe you can relate to or someone you know can relate to. Either way, this article will go over a lot of different aspects and in an effort to keep to the point, I will try to keep things short and sweet. In later weeks I will go into further detail on different parts of this article.
Anxiety affects over 40 million adults in the United States, in a study taken in April of 2021. I personally have experienced anxiety since middle school, this includes social anxiety, OCD, and panic attacks. The hardest part was not understanding why I felt this way. My heart would start pounding and I literally felt like I wanted to jump out of my skin but couldn’t. Any time I would bring up feeling this way to any adults in my family they would brush it off, telling me that I am fine and end up making me feel worse. I am an extremely emotional and empathetic person. What I discovered over time was the fact that I was taking on everyone’s problems and emotions around me. When I had an issue, I then became overwhelmed, but this wasn’t a realization I had until I was in college. At what point do you put yourself first and deal with your emotions without anyone else intruding on that process?
Learning to understand our emotions is something we should be taught as children. Why am I angry? How can I experience this emotion and move forward? Though, most of us can probably relate on some level to being taught to avoid emotions. Being emotional, I cry when I am tired, angry, hungry, sad, or for no reason. When I was young my family never tried to explain or help me understand the emotion, but was asked (aggressively) “why are you crying?” Making me feel like I was wrong.
Now, I am not here to talk about what our parents did wrong, because at the end of the day no one is given a handbook on how to raise a child. We are all just trying to do our best, but things like this do affect us for the rest of our lives. Everyone, and I mean everyone has inner childhood wounds that need to be healed, aka trauma. Trauma has a big stigma attached to it. It’s made to sound bad which means no one wants to admit it. It’s true, you, me, your parents, neighbor, and the person walking past you on campus all have trauma. This doesn’t mean that there was a huge horrifying event that happened to you, trauma can be anything that has affected you in a way that changes your life. Childhood trauma in this sense could be something as little as being laughed at when you were presenting something at school or by your parents.
My family told me that my dog got eaten by coyotes when they really gave her away, which is traumatic for a 7-year-old. Then, they gave way two more of my dogs on separate occasions when I left town for a weekend. Ask my parents now, they would say I am being dramatic, but things like this stay with you. Honestly looking back on this, it probably was a great start to my abandonment issues. Which is a great segue to what I want to talk about next, toxic relationships.
When referring to toxic relationships, I don’t just mean romantic relationships, I mean every type of relationship, even with yourself. After I started putting myself first, I noticed how many people relied on me putting them first. I would say this started my freshmen and sophomore year of college. I became more distant from my family and the relationship I was in started to crumble. Seeing all of this happen before my eyes made me feel as though I was doing something wrong. Everyone around me was suddenly mad at me.
I then shifted back into pleasing everyone I could. I never gave a hard opinion, let everyone around me decide and ended up being unhappy. Moments that I got courage to stand up for myself, everyone would try to put me back down. This caused so much more anxiety, frequent panic attacks, and over all a feeling of melancholy. It wasn’t till I moved away for a semester that I felt relief from all of these overwhelming emotions. During that semester I was able to 100% live for myself. I went completely alone and met some of my best friends there.
When I came back home all the anxiety and emotions that I had felt I left behind were just waiting for me at my doorstep. Since then, all I did was chase the way I felt when I moved away, believing that I could only truly feel like myself is when I leave everything else behind. So that’s what I did, after I graduated with my bachelors, I moved away. Then not even two months later, COVID-19 closed the world, and I came back home. This was the peak of my anxiety, crying every night and never leaving my room. I felt as though no matter what I did I would always be stuck here to feel this way.
In search for a way to change the way I felt I found spirituality which would lead me to the use of crystals. Having nothing to do during the summer of 2020, I took a course on crystal healing and learned to use crystals for their metaphysical properties. Reading every crystal book I could get my hands on, I learned how to meditate and find which crystals work best for different things. I correlate emotions to colors and based on those colors I use crystals that match. Even if you don’t believe in the metaphysical properties of crystals, learning about the differences and colorations to emotional and physical healing itself is very beneficial.
At this point, it is about understanding where your emotions come from, asking yourself why am I feeling this way and concluding that it is okay to feel that way? The magic behind crystals is your intentions behind them, meaning you don’t necessarily have to believe in them or use them. It is a great steppingstone to learn about yourself and find healing methods that work for you. When you start choosing to live for yourself, others will call you selfish. You might feel the way I did and find yourself isolated more than usual. Luckily for me this happened during the pandemic, so I was no more isolated than everyone else in the world. It is okay to live for yourself, to deal with your emotions first, and to let go of people that expect you to live for them.
My take of spirituality is living to be the best version of yourself and finding happiness. After learning how to meditate with different crystals, I came to all the realizations that I talked about today. Why I kept going back to being a people pleaser, and why I was staying in a toxic relationship, was all because I never felt comfortable just living for myself. I was taught that I am here to make other people happy and to learn to be happy with that. I hated the idea of people being upset with me or not liking me. All these stems from insecurities and childhood traumas. These are all ideologies that a lot of people don’t know about. They are why I feel like sharing my story. Understanding why I react to things in a specific way and finally learning that having and expressing emotions are a healthy way to live; I started to have less and less anxiety.
Maybe this week, you go to a crystal shop and pick one crystal that you find interesting. Look it up and learn a bit about it. Try sleeping with it, try keeping it in your pocket at school during the day, see what changes for you. All it takes is one step at a time! Listen to a guided meditation this week and see how you feel. A very talented healer I know, Katrina, has a beautiful podcast to listen to. It’s called Practical Alignment, and she specializes in childhood trauma and overcoming patterns we set ourselves in as adults. Patterns like procrastination, anxiety, and staying in toxic relationships can stem from these traumas and can easily be healed with some work.
Since this article is already quite long, I will leave you all with this:
We will never know what someone else is going through, only what we perceive, our feelings, and our realities. That’s why it is important to treat people with kindness and focus on ourselves. The more work you put into being happy with who you are the easier it will be to simply live life. Don’t over think, just live in the moment, and do what you can.
Like I said before, we are all just trying our best. Don’t live being afraid of other people’s judgements, because you will see that when you become happy with yourself you become judgment free. Later, I will go into depth about the crystals I specifically use and how I use them. This is something I am excited to talk about and thought I would have room to go into today. I want to go into depth about the properties and decided to save it for their own publishing.
I hope you all have a wonderful week and find time to live for yourself.
