Anxiety Diary #3

Travelling with Anxiety

As I write this post, I’m sitting in Bali surrounded by nature, listening to the sound of the bugs making their night time noises. It’s four more sleeps until I board the plane to London – my home for the next two years. That’s if my anxiety doesn’t stop me first.

One of the hardest things I’m having to come to terms with is my anxiety. They say travelling helps anxiety – but sitting in my hotel room, with four days to go, I feel like everyone was lying.

My anxiety feeds on being in control. Travelling is letting go of control and letting things happen. My mind runs in so many directions – what if I hate England? What if I want to leave? What if something happens to our things? What if someone gets hurt?

All these things seem so logical right now, like I NEED to worry about them, but looking back I know they’ll be stupid things. Like for example – we have travel insurance, if anything happens we’ll be covered. I can always leave if I don’t like England, but in this moment, my mind gets so set in its ways that every little obstacle seems like a huge mountain which I can’t get over.

My last counselling session we talked about what makes my anxiety worse. We figured out that in my mind, when everything is going okay and nothing is going wrong, my mind takes the situation and panics. Why is everything going right? Why has nothing gone wrong? It should be all okay. Something needs to be wrong. I panic about things not being wrong. How messed up is that?

So here I am, sitting in my hotel room, panicking about London because nothing has gone wrong? I feel like I’m making things worse, hence the feeling that there’s a huge mountain to climb, but when I look back, they won’t even be things on my radar.


Embrace the scary parts, enjoy the good parts because it’s okay for everything to work out. Life isn’t perfect and some situations will be scary and test your limits. But don’t make a mountain 3 times the size and deem it unclimbable. Lace up your shoes and show that bitch whose boss!!


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