Well… my 15th birthday is in a few minutes and I’m dreading it more than ever. This is my first birthday living with anxiety and I feel like I can’t even enjoy it. My parents are encouraging me to have a good time but they don’t understand my anxiety and how to help me. My mom keeps trying to take me places but at this point I just want to stay home like I usually do. I also dread the social aspect of birthdays, worrying about who is going to wish you a happy birthday and feeling bad if nobody seems to care. I just want to crawl into a hole and not come out until it’s over. I don’t know why I feel like this… honestly I have what’s seems to be a pretty great life. I have a lot of friends and I go out all the time, yet nobody truly knows the anxiety I struggle with every single day. It’s been like this for about 9 months, where one day I just turned into an anxious mess. I seem like just a normal teenage girl, but my anxiety is eating me away and my birthday is just a reminder of how anxiety has taken away many of the joys in my life.