Dealing with anxiety

By Yanaly Dominguez

As someone who has struggled with anxiety from a very young age I can say that it can be mentally exhausting. I had my first panic attack in 4th grade and I remember this moment very vividly. I remember having to sleep with my mom in her bedroom because I was so scared of the thought of having another panic attack. From this day forward I have struggled with anxiety. 

When I had my panic attack I felt so alone, so isolated from everyone, because I thought that no one else has ever dealt with this. I thought that this sort of thing wasn’t normal and I was the only one feeling like this, because of this I never talked about this and got the help that I needed, and to this day I still don’t think people understood how bad it affected me. Moving forward I spent a good amount of years without having to deal with anxiety, that was until my sophomore year of highschool. In January 2022 I had a very bad panic attack and it was something so different than I have ever experienced.

This affected me very much because since I was older I felt like this feeling would never go away. At least when I was younger I had things to keep my mind off of it but for some reason all I could think about was when I would get my next panic attack. It was so tiring and I felt so trap in my body and I wished so badly that it would just end

My mom saw how bad it was and since she worked in Kaiser she set up a zoom call appointment with a therapist that worked for Kaiser. Having the zoom call did not help at all. After this zoom call I knew that no one would get how I felt except me and that did scare me because I just wanted to move on from this. Luckily during this time I had my mom supporting me and I also started to get more involved in books.

I thank my mom everyday for helping me get through this, I don’t know where I would be if it weren't for her. She tried so hard to understand me for her to be able to help me and I am forever grateful. Every single day she would check up on me, if I started to get panic attacks I would text her and she would stop doing whatever she was doing and try to help me. I appreciate her so much and even though this time was a hard time for us I definitely think our relationship got stronger from this. 

During that time I also picked up reading. I read both fiction and books that had to do with mental health, and they both helped me very much. The books about mental health definitely made me more aware of what I was dealing with. It taught me things that I should do to reduce anxiety, and for fictional books, it distracted me from my problems and just from the world. Reading completely changed my life for the better, it distracted me from the times I had really bad anxiety and it definitely calmed me down. Reading reduced both my stress and anxiety. To this day I still love to read. I'm so grateful for my books and for my mom. Both helped me get through this stage in my life and I am forever grateful.