EVERYONE experiences anxiety in their life, whether it is when you are standing in front of your class giving a presentation that could determine your entire grade for the quarter or the time you forgot to hand in a paper you were supposed to give to your teacher the day before. Anxiety has always been around and can be triggered by many different things. It has also always been something that not only teenagers experience, but adults too. Maybe your grandfather suffers from anxiety and you just have no idea. But why is that? Why do people choose to not talk about how they are feeling or what is going on in their lives? Is it because they don’t want to bore others with this subject matter? Or maybe it is because they don’t think someone else could relate and give them the words of advice they want to hear, or even worse, maybe it’s because they don’t want your help.

Anxiety is not a topic that easily gets brought up in conversation. However, it should not be an excuse to not do something challenging. Anxiety might be what prevents you from having the courage to overcome fear, but it doesn’t make it impossible. Isn’t it ridiculous how a feeling can make you question everything!? It can fill your brain with horrible thoughts that make you hate yourself. Anxiety is a constant reminder that everyone is better than you, that you will never get anywhere in life. Or is it? Maybe subconsciously your brain created this idea of anxiety to better you, to want you to become the best you possible.

But that doesn’t sound right. Isn’t it possible that what we experience around us affects the way we think, the way we look at ourselves?

Let’s take social media. Do not get me wrong, I love it. I use social media to talk to my friends, the ones who do and don’t live here. But it is filling our brains with information that we do not need. Take models for example. We are told that they are the ideal of beauty for men and women, that if we do not have the perfect skin, if we do not have a skinny body, then we are not beautiful. What is that? What is beauty? Can’t anyone be beautiful without having the “perfect” skin or the “perfect” body? Trust me, I’ve thought this through over and over, but what is there to do? It is as if we have all been brainwashed into thinking a small majority of the population is beautiful, which is completely false. We have created crazy standards, and these standards lead to anxiety for many of us, and anxiety can create depression. So let’s look at it this way: no matter what you think, no matter what they say, you are the most beautiful person alive, and we all know it.