I'm sorry for my English, I'm italian. I hope everything will be understandable.

I also think this one will be long, my bad.

So, I (20F) will soon start the ninth month of therapy in a row. At the very beginning it was much harder, but now I can see I'm making progress! My therapist told me I have problems with generalized anxiety and social anxiety, low self esteem and at the moment I started therapy i was pretty down. So we started: she would explain to me how social interaction works (I wasn't good at it before, let alone after the pandemic), how to stop bad thoughts, how to deal with anxiety attacks, with all of the anxiety induced by university and cohabitation for the first time. 

I used to feel like an idiot because I was litterally paying a doctor to explain to me things 3 y.o's do better than me. It was a bit demoralizing but I was happy I put myself in the condition of making real progress. Also, when you have social anxiety something you think a lot about is what people are thinking while interacting with you, so being explained that many of the things I think are just in my mind was soooo helpful. Especially considering I think the rational part of me was sure I was exaggerating many scenarios in my head, but then there's the anxiety that doesn't allow bad thoughts to stop, and being told for the first time that people don't costantly hate me, judge me, observe me, etc made me feel more calm. So she would expain to me how to handle many situations I would just ignore and hope they would disappear someday, somehow.

Well, here's the 3 things I want to change the most about my life right now: how i handle university, how I handle cohabitation, and how to meet new people (and make new friends).

University: last year was a fucking disaster. I didn't pass even one exam. I would not study, keep on procrastinate untill it was too late and would have anxiety attacks before all of my exams. Well, I'm studying a bit now! I've done just one exam by now (and I know I won't graduate in time) but it's still better than zero and hopefully the situation will improve! I still have anxiety attacks before my exams, but not before all of them, which is good. The road is stil veeeery long but I'm learning how to handle it better. Also she was the fist person to ever tell me she thought I could do it, and I swear I cried when she told me, cause I don't always fell like the people in my life are very supportive.

Cohabitation: unfortunately I live with people (1 friend, 2 acquaintances) who have mental health problems as well, and sometimes it's just so hard to be forced to cohabit with other people problems', especially if they're not people you actually care about (my acquaintances). It's so hard with the one who is used to let go her anger and unsatifaction on us because she just becomes mean, and I hate feeling attacked. However, I'm educating myself to just ignore them, and it seems to be working at the moment!

Making new friends: I have 2 friends, one of them lives abroad and the other one will move abroad on semptember, so I was pretty agitated cause if they both leave I'll have no one to talk to (we would still be friends, but of couse we would chat less and I couldn't force them to pay so much attention to me, they need a life outside of me as well). So I was talking with my therapist about it and she suggested I might try an app. In r/introvert they talked about bumble and I gave it a go. Well, I started talking to a few people. Two days ago I decided to force myself to hang out (like, in real life) with one of them. It was pretty awkward: I was agitated, he didn't speak Italian so I would speak English and I was nervous because I haven't been practicing with my English (speaking) for a while, he was a bit pushy (he wouldn't understand my boundaries, but I'm a people pleaser, so I'm afraid I wasn't too good at explaining them  as well). So it wasn't a brilliant "date", but I went there! Also I was nervous because he insisted on bringing me back home (I tried to tell him I didn't feel like, but as I said he was pushy) and now he knows where I live, so that made me nervous. Also we had a picnic, and when i saw him eating with his hand (even tho that was exactly what he was supposed to do) my pandemic anxiety raised. Like, use some hand sanitizer, please. So the whole experience trigged my anxiety on many levels (as I thoght it would be), but I went there!

So, a bit of a progress. I honestly relized I don't know when I started struggling with anxiety. At first I thaoght it was when I was 16, then I thoght it was induced by the pandemic, then I relized that I already had many physical anxiety symptoms when I was like 8. So it's hard to understand if that's something I always had or it's something that developed later in life, so I can't make predictions on my healing.

And here's a few tricks I learnt that maybe someone might find helpful:

* I don't drink coffee/smoke (I never did and hopefully I'll never start), I was told not assuming them can make you improve
* If you sleep a good amount of time you can be awake enough to stop the bad thoughts! Like when it's late and I'm more tired I think about the worst. If I sleep more I'm more succesfull into stopping bad thoughts
* Resting is important: I'm pretty sure people around me just think I'm lazy, but anxiety tires the shit out of you. Like it's exhausting. You need rest, if you need more rest and can take don't feel guilty about it

That's all. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.