SameTide
I Feel Like No One Gets My Anxiety
The first time it happened I was at a movie theater, and my heart just started racing out of nowhere and I couldn't breathe, and within a few minutes I was on the floor in the hallway completely certain I was dying. Someone called an ambulance and it went on for hours, and after all of that the medics checked me over and told me nothing was physically wrong, which just left me lying there thinking, then why did it feel exactly like dying?
A year later I still get them, and that is still the hardest part to explain to anyone, because if the sentence in your head is "i feel like no one gets my anxiety," then I already know what you mean by it. People hear the word anxiety and assume I mean worry, when what I actually mean is lying awake after everyone else has gone to sleep, scared of my own body all over again.
If you might be in danger or you're thinking about harming yourself, this page isn't crisis support. In the US, call or text 988. Anywhere else, you can find a local line at findahelpline.com.
"Have you tried just breathing?"
People who loved me reached for the words they had and tried to calm me down, and someone told me I just needed to move more, so I tried jogging one day and it set off one of the worst attacks I've had. They meant well and I knew that, but when my chest was that tight those lines sounded like they were describing some completely different problem, because I was trying to explain a body alarm that would not switch off and everything coming back at me just made it sound smaller than it actually felt.
I don't really blame anyone for missing it, since a lot of this is genuinely hard to picture from a description, but that is where the loneliness started for me, standing right in front of people who cared about me and knowing they had never once felt this in their own body.
Tired of explaining your anxiety
The thing that wore me down almost as much as the panic itself was having to start the whole story over every single time. I kept saying the same thing in different rooms, to a doctor after the tests came back clean and I still walked out scared, to someone who loved me and asked but aren't you better now, to the person who just went quiet because they had no idea what to say, and by the time I got to the end of it, it never once sounded as bad as it had actually felt.
That is what I mean when I say I got tired of explaining my anxiety, because the panic exhausted me and then the explaining exhausted me on top of it, and I hated hearing myself flatten the whole thing into a tidy little speech and then watching the other person try to be kind about something they still couldn't quite picture. After a while I started dreading the retelling before I'd even opened my mouth.
The first time I did not have to explain all of it
It happened almost by accident, when I heard from someone who had been through something similar, and we talked for a while without either of us giving the other advice, just saying out loud how bad it actually gets and how strange it is to be sure you're dying one minute and then expected to act normal an hour later. When I told them I knew it was probably fine and I was still terrified out of my mind, they knew exactly what I meant and I didn't have to make the fear sound reasonable first. The panic was still there afterward, but for a little while I stopped feeling like something was wrong with me for having it, and that did more for me than hours of careful explaining to people who loved me, I think because the other person already had their own version of the story and didn't need mine to come out perfect.
Why another person with panic feels different
There is a kind of conversation I could never quite force with people who had never had a panic attack, because I could be completely honest and they could be endlessly patient and there was still this gap between us, whereas with someone who had actually been through it I didn't have to spend the first ten minutes proving the fear was even real. Before that I'd only ever found it by accident, usually in one unexpected message or a single sentence somewhere that made me sit up because I'd been so sure it was only me. What I really wanted was a plain place for that kind of recognition to exist, somewhere the explanation didn't turn into a pep talk or a rescue mission, so that I could finally stop rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
You shouldn't have to explain it twice
SameTide is testing one small question right now, which is whether writing the story down once can make all the later explaining less awful. It asks you a few private questions at your own pace, with no name or account needed to start, and turns your answers into a first-person "My Story" of what your anxiety actually feels like, so the page ends up sounding like the person who answered it instead of a form. The matching part isn't here yet, and someone reading your story and recognizing the kind of panic you described is the direction it's heading rather than something I can promise today, so for now it really is just the writing part, getting the words down once in a form that might carry more than the rushed version I used to give whenever someone asked what was wrong. If "no one understands my anxiety" is the thought sitting in your head tonight, SameTide starts with one private page.
This is a private writing tool, not live support, crisis care, or a chat with another person. If you need someone right now, please use the crisis lines below.
A few honest answers
Why does it feel like no one understands my anxiety?
For me it felt that way because most of the worst parts were invisible, so people would see me looking fine barely an hour after I'd been terrified of my own body, and I could describe it as clearly as I wanted but the description always came out smaller than the thing itself.
Why do I feel so alone with anxiety?
I felt alone because I kept trying to prove something that nobody could actually see, and the fear was bad enough on its own, but the explaining made it worse, especially when people genuinely cared and still somehow missed the exact part I most needed them to understand.
Why am I so tired of explaining my anxiety?
Because every retelling came out a little smaller than the last, since I would start with the real thing sitting in my chest and end up with a careful, reasonable-sounding version that wore me down a bit more each time.
If you need help right now: If you're thinking about harming yourself, or you're in immediate danger, please reach out to a crisis line. This article isn't a substitute for that. In the US, you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Outside the US, you can find a local line at findahelpline.com.
Written anonymously by someone who lives with panic disorder.