Traveling alone is one of my favorite things I’ve learned to do in my twenties. The experience of getting on a plane, landing in a new town, and learning my way around has become a healing, fulfilling practice. But, like any habit you want to build, it does take practice and some forethought.

This feels like a Jay-Z, “allow me to reintroduce myself” kind of moment. I realized that while I have built a career around talking about mental health, I don’t regularly check-in about how my own journey with anxiety is going. If you’re new around here, I have been going to therapy since the end of 2013 and it was there that I realized that a lot of the “feelings” I had (and have had since I was a child) were actually anxiety.

Starting to explore my mental health years ago was a humbling experience. I was a novice. Yeah, I’d learned the alphabet in grade school and with it I was taught to piece together sentences around subjects like biology, history, and every day conversations, but I was never taught the alphabet or dictionary of words that I would need to describe the world that lived in my head. For a long time, it felt unfair. I had an entire experience I lived through daily and that impacted my world endlessly, but no way to tell others what it felt like or how much it actually shifted the trajectory of my day.

I had to learn to use colloquial words — elephant, chest, treadmill, alphabet soup — to build visuals in hopes someone would understand, in hopes someone would throw a life raft so I wouldn’t drown in the soup.

I think I’ve lived with anxiety my entire life. I can remember being 7 years old and telling my mom that I had a really bad stomach ache and didn’t want to get in the car. She thought I was just feeling physically off, but looking back I know now that my stomachache was a symptom to a larger reality. My anxiety manifests in my stomach, in the tension in my shoulders, and in a looming fear over most things in my life.

I wasn’t officially treated for anxiety until I was 21 years old and started therapy. My long-term care routine for my anxiety has up until now been talk therapy. It’s helped me so much to have a dedicated space where I can work through the ins and outs of how (and sometimes why) my anxiety manifests. I’ve written before that this last winter re-triggered a lot of dormant fears and anxious reactions. It has been a time when I’ve especially turned to the small ways I can help myself manage.

During one of my first therapy sessions way back when, my therapist lovingly stared my way and said, “You need things outside of yourself to help anchor you on bad days.” At the time of her telling me this, my bad days were very, very bad. My hours were consumed with anxiety or depressive thoughts. The idea of cultivating a full roster of actions or safe spaces I could turn to on bad days felt incredibly difficult because I barely had the energy to walk out of the apartment in the first place.

Thinking back on those days, it was the most humbling season of my life. The perfectionist and problem solver in me wanted to be able to sit down for 15 minutes and brainstorm her way to a quick fix. Mental health doesn’t work on quick fixes though. Each day became a challenge and a reminder that the only way out of a bad day was through it and the only way through it was with acceptance and understanding the difference between what I could do and what I wanted to do.

I’ve been taking more baths lately. That can read as applaudable levels of self-care, but personally it’s actually one of my biggest tells. Taking a bath for me has always been calming, but when I’m doing it daily I know it’s a response to a hard season.

Baths become my own version of time out.

The anxiety was sitting in my throat, in my stomach and in the back of my eyes. I was choking on the words that would speak into existence what I was thinking - I was anxious because I felt guilty for being happy. I had unshed tears that spoke to the stress of being pulled in opposite directions — I was overwhelmed by the anxiety and sad that I felt this way in the first place. The pit in my stomach, this spoke to the reality that old habits die hard and the strong ties between my anxiety and my body were still there for however faint they’d been recently.

I was a conglomeration of feelings. In my mind was a woman with a shield in front of her face trying her best to ward the worst of this off. I journaled. I spoke positive affirmations at every threat to my happiness. I sought out manageability in all that felt unmanageable. I did what I know helps and then I ran out of things to do.

So, I sat.

Last week I was sitting on the floor with papers and pictures spread out around me. In my mind I could see the playpen my mom used to park in front of the TV just a few feet away from where I was sitting.

As a toddler, I’d bounce along to Barney. Outside of the playpen, I used the floor as my training ground for crawling and learning to walk.

As a kid, I learned about real estate and the importance of Park Place while playing Monopoly with my cousin and aunt on that floor.

Building piles and pushing memories around on this floor to make room for more has always felt normal and like home. Even though last week didn’t look much different, it was. I was trying to find my birth certificate and social security card because coming home here was no longer going to be an easy, viable option. I couldn’t keep splitting myself between two homes because in a few weeks, my boyfriend, my puppy, and I would be hopping on a plane and moving across the country.