Screw it!

These two words are so so powerful. This phrase is life-changing.

The first time I went to therapy I was talking about not doing things because it made me feel anxious to do them. My therapist asked me, "can you feel anxiety and still do the thing?" I said I wasn't sure and she asked me if I'd ever done homework before even when I didn't want to do it. I still did something despite feeling an uncomfortable feeling about it. Sure you shouldn't do something if you truly feel uncomfortable and in danger, but there are things we have to do that can make us anxious due to a disorder. Things like asking a professor for help on an assignment, going to a job interview, buying groceries, going to the doctor; these are things we kind of can't avoid when we want to be a functioning adult. So sometimes you have to reconcile with the fact that you'll have to do things even if you're anxious.

My first therapist also told me when I was diagnosed with GAD that something like this disorder wouldn't just go away. It's not really a thing that can be cured. Sure there would be times when I had this disorder controlled better and I would be functioning normally and not having panic attacks, but my disorder would never just go away. This was initially very hard to hear, but then it became sort of liberating. Eventually my reaction was:

Screw it.

If I was going to feel anxious no matter what I did, might as well do anything I wanted to do. Of course this didn't work every time I felt anxious, and it still doesn't, but it did lead to me having some really crazy experiences. It lead to me kissing a random stranger as part of a tradition at my college, it lead to me graduating from that college, it lead to me singing on a stage in front of thousands of people, it lead to me telling my husband when he was just a coworker that I had a huge crush on him, it lead to me going on my first solo vacation a few months ago. Every time I felt the physical sensations of anxiety telling me not to do a thing, if I said, out loud, "screw it" something pretty cool happened.

Sometimes you just gotta say screw it.

XO.