BEING AN EMPATH AND LIVING WITH ANXIETY

Living with anxiety and the fear of anxiety attacks is horrible. You never know when it might creep in and ruin something amazing. Whether it being a situation, an opportunity, a relationship or just a good day. When you do feel it lurking, you panic. Because you know that it’s just a matter of time before you can’t breathe, before the hyperventilation and tears kicks in, before you feel like your heart is going to rip out your chest, before you get claustrophobic from being in your own body and just have to get out. It is terrifying. It’s like being a prisoner in your own head and you feel like you just want to rip off your entire skin.

Now take that and combine it with being an empath. If you thought the above was brutal, this is torture. As an empath you absorb the energy and feelings of people around you. You feel their pain very clear and the slightest shift in the behaviour of people around you, affects you because you feel it instantly. It is so difficult to block out foreign energy and tell the difference between what’s your own and what you’ve just picked up from someone else. So lets say you’ve met and touched around 10 people one day. 4 of these were having a really bad day or struggling with personal issues. This energy is now your energy too. You now feel this as your own energy. This combined with an actual anxiety attack is one of the worst and most heavy things I’ve ever experienced.

This summer it happened to me. I was under a lot of stress with personal issues, too much work, appointments etc. The worst part though was, that I was drunk and at a party the night it happened. So I had been interacting with so many people all night and my guard was down. So I was practically just working as one big magnet to whatever energy I touched or came in contact with. Unfortunately I was already in a bad place this night and if I had paid attention I could have spotted the anxiety attack coming this night miles away. But I chose to ignore it. All of this resulted in me ending up on a beach all alone at 3 am in the morning with one of the biggest anxiety attacks I’ve had my entire life. I don’t even know why I had razor blades in my purse or why I went to the beach. But I did. And I totally lost it and blacked out and cut both of my wrists. It is important for me to emphasise the fact that most of the time when people cut themselves (including me this time) or does any other kind og self-harming behaviour, it’s not because they wish to die. But merely just to transfer the pain in your mind to something physical that you can actually “feel” and “touch”. This offers some sort of weird relief in the moment but afterwards you just feel so ashamed and weak… I don’t even wanna know what the Uber driver must have thought when he picked me up. But I got home safe, stormed in crying, hyperventilating and woke up my brother. I think it just hit me what really happened and what actually could have happened that night.

Luckily, I managed to snap out of the black hole I was heading down and didn’t end up cutting myself again on a regular basis as I did when I was younger. But the problem with this is that anxiety attacks can trigger this behaviour, even though you thought you had fought it for good. It’s legit been years since I’d been cutting myself. Which kind of made it even more terrifying for me to see, that I could still “relapse”. I thought I couldn’t.

Obviously this is beyond difficult and vulnerable for me to share with you, but I have to because I so often find myself wishing someone else would share their experiences, bc. I feel so alone and strange. Most of you know that I’ve had quite the past with these kinds of issues and that I from time to time, feel obligated to raise awareness, so that others may know that they are not alone. I know that there are so many people struggling every day with a war inside their heads, which they have no idea how to fight. I’ve come to the realisation that talking about it and opening up about it, is the only thing that helps me. Finding other people, who knows how it feels, helps too. So I started telling people in my life about it. In that way I took away some of it’s power and regained a little of my own and hope to encourage others to do the same. Don’t hide in the dark.