Hi. I haven’t been diagnosed with anxiety, but I figured this was a situation you all have dealt with often. I’m just desperate and don’t know where else to turn.

My sister paces a lot. I love her to death, but it makes me want to curl up in a ball and die. I can recite every millisecond of her movement, interludes by her clicking her heel with the ground, before launching herself off the wall and doing it again. Sometimes this happens in a loop for half an hour or more. She’ll run during random interludes too, extremely quickly and without direction before stopping and going back to her slow pace.

It’s so grating to me that I’ve cried myself to sleep because of it. I’ll be cooking or reading or literally anything else and she’ll start, and I can see it in the corner of my eye and hear her heels click and all that I can think is that someone is approaching me. You know that feeling you get when you hear footsteps approaching your doorway and you have to wait two or three seconds for it to arrive? It’s like that, but on loop. I can always see her moving sporadically, doing the same clicking with her heels while wearing the loudest loudest Converse that have ever graced this Earth, and I can’t do it anymore.

I haven’t brought it up because I know it’s something she can’t prevent. It’s a tick for her, and it’s not my place to tell her she cannot do it. Further, it’s probably less trouble for me to stop getting so stressed by it than for her to learn to do something else. I just don’t know what to do anymore, and I’m so stressed at all times that I’m about to tear my hair out.