Because I live with anxiety I also get to live with 30 years of embarrassing memories that play on a loop in my head whenever it starts to get too quiet.

I know I’m not the only one who deals with this particular type of anxiety and I think it’s a fairly human thing to dwell on mistakes of the past. I assume however people are less likely to hunker down on the what if’s of a mistake you made in the 3rd grade. My life would be no different now than had I not lied about that kid stealing my lunch money for attention. Had I made that story up then or not I would have done something similar later down the line, but- that does not keep me from replaying the moment over and over in my mind.

Or how about in high school when I asked a friend “Have you broken up with her yet?” and then pointed to his girlfriend- who no, he had not broken up with yet- in the middle of a group of then teenagers.

Then there was the time when an another friend who ran her full body in to me, but because I wasn’t paying attention, scraped my face about two foot across the ground in front of the whole school. She felt terrible, I played it cool.

This ones really embarrassing, in the 5th grade I farted in class. I have IBS with diarrhea my dudes and chronic migraines that started as stomach pains. My whole life I’ve had stomach problems so holding in a fart was really hard back then. So I farted and this girl heard it and well, you know how kids are. I was laughed at so hard I left the classroom and asked the teacher to call my mom because I wanted to go home. It’s taken me 20 years to be comfortable to fart in front of people just because of that one incident.

Why am I telling writing this out like this? I don’t know, it’s not like it’s going to make the memories stop replaying or that these are even the worst ones. But I don’t know, maybe if I just keep writing them out, keep pushing them out of me, eventually they’ll relinquish some of their power.