May is Mental Health Awareness month. Because of this, I want to bring awareness to multiple mental health illnesses, both well-known and those that are “overshadowed.”

Today I wanted to specifically talk about a mental health disorder that has been noticed in many teens nowadays. Anxiety. Anxiety doesn’t look the same on everyone. Some people can “disguise” it better than others. Social anxiety is something that I struggle with daily. For me, it causes my heart to race quicker than usual and it even makes my hands sweatier. 

Anxiety isn’t just getting nervous before having to do something important. Nerves are normal. Anxiety is an intense feeling of worry and fear over everyday situations. What I notice that I experience is that even with just ordering some food, which is a normal thing to do, my heart will start to race and I will become extremely nervous because I don’t want to mess up. 

With the pandemic, I realized a surge of social anxiety that I was experiencing. Being in lockdown and not having people to physically talk to/see really messed me up. I noticed that I lost the few social skills I had before the pandemic. Having spent the past year doing everything behind a computer doesn’t help either.