I’ve been questioning everything about my life lately. Am I actually recovering? Can I recover? Do I want to recover? Are my dreams still the same? Am I the same person as I was before anxiety came crashing down on me? Do I want to reconnect with lost friends and family? Is what I’m doing right now good for me?

Identity crisis aren’t new to me. I’ve floated around the idea of different personas and phases, all, at the time, feeling like ‘the real me’, before coming to the realisation that the person I was wasn’t who I wanted to be. ‘The real me’ was a closeted 15 year old deep in an ‘indie’ phase. ‘The real me’ was an 18 year old who desperately wanted a job and a fresh start at life after high school. ‘The real me’ is a 21 year old who can get anxious leaving their house, and dreams of running down the beach without intrusive thoughts screaming ‘go back’.

It’s natural for people to change, for their identity, dreams, goals, relationships to become something completely new, or partly disappear. What I have trouble with, is that often I cling to ideas and labels too hard, to what I’d said was ‘the real me’, which only leaves myself stuck and uncomfortable in my skin. While I crave learning and growth and change, my brain likes comfort and boundaries, keeping me in the same little box, sometimes, especially now, physically constrained from exploration.

Everywhere around me things are changing. The roads in my home town don’t look the same each time I venture out deeper, old friends have gone quieter, aren’t like I remember them to be. It’s inevitable that the world and people in it are going to grow  despite some peoples desperate pleas. I don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want to be clinging to a version of myself that no longer feels true. I don’t want to watch everything and everyone else flourish and bloom while I’m still tucked comfortably in my little pit.

Right now I’m in the middle of figuring out exactly what I want, the answers to those questions that keep swirling in my anxious mind. I’m slowly getting there. I am recovering, I know that as a start,  I have recovered before so I also know it is possible, and I want to be able to go to the beach, so yes, I do want to recover. Maybe my dreams are the same, maybe the aren’t, I’m not sure yet. One thing I know for sure, like with everything, they will grow with me.