I have always been a worrier. I can look back on my childhood now at the age of 27, and recognise the signs of anxiety developing. By the way, my name is Priya (Name changed) and I’d like to share my part of life.

My stressful ways developed into anxiety around 7 years ago. I wasn’t lucky enough to have kept any close friends from my college days, and went into a reckless phase after ending college, developing friendships with people who I was better off away from.

When I decided it was time to leave this phase, and all the people involved in it behind, I was left virtually friendless.

I put all my physical energy into working full time, whilst learning business. This meant working seven days a week, and learning skills to trade.

You may ask why I put myself through this, well I had a lust to travel. I took on the financial burden of paying for friends always, paying bills for everyone, buy DSLR, laptops, etc for friends, and I was ignored by them while they used me for my money.

When I meet people one of the first things, they mention to me is the money I put in. Yes, I for my friends but they’re weird and I don’t know why I’m doing this. It gave me something to look forward to, and something to get me through the long days of being miserable in my life. It was a short period of people around me for my money.

In order to work these extreme hours, I gave up every aspect of my social life and wellbeing. This meant I had a very small group of people I interacted with, none of whom were honest or actual friends. I ate terribly and never exercised, resulting in weight gain, as I was simply too exhausted to cook or go to the gym after work. Every savings of my earnings went into paying for non-real friends, so I was never able to indulge in anything in my day-to-day life.

This pattern kept up for well over 3 years, from which I developed horrific social anxiety, and I even hate people. But recently I met a really good and honest person, he’s my teddy and at least I feel he’s a real friend and never asked me anything about money and always gave me a shoulder to talk shit. I could buy anything for him, but he says if I buy anything more than he really could afford then he’d lose his friendship, that’s where he taught me something about people.

My experience of dealing with social anxiety was a feeling of overwhelming fear when interacting with individuals I wasn’t comfortable with. I was unable to look people in the eye when speaking to them neither am I now, but teddy’s helping, and struggled to keep a conversation going and now improving. I came off as both extremely quiet and shy, as well as rude, which anyone who knows me well knows I am the opposite of.

During this period of my life, my self-confidence was at an all-time low, and I felt disgusted every time I looked in the mirror. I stayed away from people as much as I could and I randomly texted online in the hope to find a good person amongst sex craving beasts and felt I made an embarrassment of myself whenever I went out in public. I constantly had a voice in my head saying “Why would anyone want to be friends with you? You are ugly and pathetic and a sick low weird person.”

Things turned around when met teddy online, and was lucky enough to be close friends very soon. This meant for the first time that I was happily talking to some human outside my house, who doesn’t care about my money and just is happy with my company. For the first time in over many years I was able to spend money on things that seem so trivial but play a huge role in our self-confidence, such as getting my hair done and buying some new clothes. I also cut back on my ridiculous work schedule.

I’m happy to say now that a year on things has improved tremendously.

Would I say my life is perfect and I am happy every day? No. But do I still have that feeling that I am dying on the inside? Not in the slightest.

I did small things, which made such a huge change to my life, like getting drunk and calling teddy, started exercising, ate good food, work life balance, learning to talk to people. Most importantly, I have a real friend who has stayed by my side even though it’s a short time now, through all the anxiety attacks and sleepless crying nights, whilst trusting me, when I was an extremely hard person to love, he made me feel I’m worth living a life and not commit suicide.

However, things are not always perfect and I realised this job was causing my anxiety to reappear. I was going back down the path to the dark place I had been for so long. I can say that for the first time in my life I put my mental health first and quit this job. It took me too long to crawl out of that pitch black, horrific place and I do not intend to ever return.

I understand my story may be nothing compared to what some people face, but if even one person relates it was worth writing.

So, if you are out there, I promise things will get better. Just keep pushing on, one day at a time, and maybe find a teddy-like person in your life, I was lucky his actual nickname was teddy and he’s been such a sweetheart to me and so many others too. He’s not perfect, but for me, he’s really perfect and most importantly someone who made my life so much to live for right now, and we’re still in the battle that he accepts a gift from me for what he did, but as he said waiting for his birthday.

Lastly, just fine that perfect jigsaw that fits your life. Means a lot and is worth spending your life.