Hi all,
Today is the fifth anniversary of The Anxiety Tracker. I set this site up in good faith on 15 June
2012 and I am surprised by my own admission that I have kept it going since,
with approximately one blog post every month.
If it has helped or influenced just one person over the years, I will be
satisfied. Moreover, if you’d have said to me five years ago that I would be in
exactly the place I actually am now, I wouldn’t have believed you (see matrix
on first blog of this series).
I have saved who I would deem the most important ‘group’ of people to
thank in this final blog in the Five Blogs of Thanks series: my friends. I mean
the ‘conventional’ friends (see last blog!) who are also, anyway, my ‘best’
friends out of everyone that has supported me.
I could get a little emotional here.
Because I have such a small family that is not local and most of whom I
am not particularly close to, and because I am an only child, I have always
relied on friends for company, laughter and to share things with. My friends dragged me through school years
quite frankly. I was the nobody, the coward, the quiet one, the wimp. I was actually going through chronic anxiety
which was largely the reason for that, but ultimately I had no confidence
whatsoever and having a network of close friends kept me going. It was a small,
close-knit network, but for me it worked.
I owe a lot to three of my friends in particular. One I met in 1991, yes when we were four, and
we are still great friends today, 26 years on. I am going to be best man at his
wedding soon (which I am told is a good barometer for measuring extent of
friendship in people our age these days). He moved away from where I lived in 1999,
first year of high school; our maintained friendship proves our strength but
also emphasises why I owe a huge amount of gratitude to two other people I met
at the very start of high school who, again, I am still close to today.
These gentlemen saw me at my worst.
Largely, until we got older and I knew what was going on, this wasn’t
attributed to anxiety; I was just ‘different to everyone else.’ But despite my
moods and various other issues, these guys stuck by me and remained people I
could trust and laugh with. And that is the balance I have managed to strike
with most of my friends; I know I can act utterly stupid with all of them,
laugh wildly and play ridiculous card games – but the next minute talk openly
about mental health. It works.
With a couple of exceptions, all of my closest friends I met at school.
I don’t know if this is normal, but that is the reality for me. I would say I
have seven close friends within my network, which to me feels perfect. Enough
to maintain the social interaction one needs when one is single and a lone
sibling with a tiny family. But not too much to overwhelm, to potentially throw
me into more socially anxious situations. I could not be more comfortable with
all of these people; they accept me for who I am. It is obvious I am socially awkward, it isn’t
normal to be single come (nearly) 30, I don’t necessarily like the
stereotypical things other guys do. But they don’t care. So many seem to.
It is easy to say, as I do often, “I don’t know where I would have been
without X.” Quite honestly, when it comes to my friends, I genuinely do not
know where I’d be. They have dragged me through hard, nigh-on impossible times
– either knowingly or unknowingly – and continue to do so. They have done this
by lighting up the room when I need a pick up, or by talking frankly, openly
and honestly to me when it’s needed. They have been there for support when
otherwise I would have had none.
I admit that I have become reliant on my friends to pull me through
difficult times. I don’t think they quite know how reliant and I just hope that
at no point have I come across as being too
reliant. But ultimately that’s the reality; without them sticking by me my
life would have contained a huge empty hole that, no doubt, would have filled
with anxiety.
If you’re one of the people I’m referring to in this post, you know who
you are. Thank you, for just about everything.
And thank you to anyone who
has read these Five Blogs of Thanks or, indeed, any of the 128 posts before
them. You’re all great.
Here’s to another five years.
😃
Al
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