Nanea Hoffman’s Anxiety Blob
Nanea Hoffman is the founder of Sweatpants & Coffee. She is the creator of the anxiety blob. Nanea describes how it feels like to live with anxiety through art and writing. As a person who knows first hand what is like with it, I can relate to her drawings. Anxiety is an invisible monster, whispering all sorts of delusional things to you. You never have peace of mind. You worry about everything, and if you are not worrying about anything, then you worry about not worrying. It’s an emotional roller coaster. It gets to the point that you can’t function at all. You start missing out on fun activities because of constant fear. You end up living life defensive. In fact you are not living at all, you are surviving. The follow pictures are Nanea’s experience with anxiety:
Do you agree with these descriptions? I sure do! What other experiences do you have with anxiety? Let me know in the comment section below. Also, you can read my personal experience with anxiety in this article: F*ck Anxiety – A True Inspirational Story.
The truth is I prefer certain types of communication because I am introverted, I am not anxious however. People would like me to try harder to be more extroverted, but it doesn’t work like that. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to get out of the car and go into a place that’s loud and has tons of people, because the expectations of required social interaction and communication especially of small talk is draining, when all i want to do is enjoy the event my way and not be forced into a more extroverted way. The coping strategies are similar, as well as most of the other comments etc. This seems to relate the two together somewhat, or could at least be confusing for some people to understand the difference. This contributes to misunderstanding of the introversion extroversion spectrum. It leads I’ll informed people to associate introversion with a condition, which it is not.