I knew that it was unreasonable to think that someone had poisoned my beef jerky, but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. I managed to take a bite. I chewed slowly, trying to detect whether anything was off about the flavor. “It doesn’t taste right,” I thought, and spit it out. I threw the rest of it away. Later, when my mom picked me up from school, she asked how I liked my lunch, expecting me to be excited at what she’d packed. I mumbled that it was okay. “Didn’t you like your Slim Jim?” she asked. “It was stale,” I lied. “I had to throw it away.” She shook her head and said, “Oh.” Guilt squirmed in my gut. I felt bad for lying, and even worse for not eating the Slim Jim when my mom had so thoughtful picked it out for me. 
(click for larger view)
(Totally the type of outfit my mom wore when I was a kid.)
That same thing happened several other times when I was around that age. Sometimes I thought my gummy bears tasted funny, or the flavor of my brownie was off. I always decided that they were poisoned and threw them away. I missed out on a lot of good snacks that way.
It wasn’t just the lunch thing. I had a lot of other bizarre worries. I was afraid of listening to the school marching band play live. The loud drums scared me and made my heart beat so hard I thought it was going to explode. I was also afraid that if I sat on something that connected to another person (say sitting on the same couch cushion as someone else), then they could hear my thoughts. On a conscious level, I knew those things couldn’t really be true. But in the clutches of those creepy thoughts, I couldn’t reason with myself.
That was before I knew what was wrong with me. It wasn’t until I got older that I heard the term anxiety disorder and started to figure out what I was dealing with. I’m 26 years old now, and I still deal with my anxiety problems on a daily basis. The purpose of this blog is to share stories about growing up with anxiety disorder. I’ve been studying anxiety disorders for years, and one of the things I hate is the vague descriptions of what it’s like to experience anxiety and panic attacks. So my goal here is to recount specific incidences ranging from my childhood experiences to my current ones with the dual hope of helping myself and potentially helping someone else who’s going through this same craziness. And I'll also be including strips that illustrate my adventures in being paranoid, obsessed and weird.
That's all I've got for you now. Later, gators.
