You see, my anxiety can have an insatiable appetite if I feed it. It is a hungry ghost. It makes me believe that if I just had this, looked like this, did that, I would be happy. But anxiety and happiness are not opposites. As my marriage showed me, you can be both happy and anxious at the same time. In fact, when we are most happy may also be when we're most anxious, because it means we have something important to lose.

How can everything in life be going right, yet I still feel like everything is wrong? This may be a hard concept for the logical human mind to hold, but anxiety has no logic. Where we go wrong is in thinking that someone or something will "fix" us. People with generalized anxiety disorder are not broken, and anxiety is not something to run away from or overcome.

So many people in my life misunderstood that fact—my family, my exes, some friends. "Pull it together," someone would say. "Learn to self-soothe." "Choose your thoughts!" "Be grateful." And I, in turn, absorbed those voices. When anxiety arose, I would do everything in my power to try to not feel what I was feeling. I would blame, I would self-medicate, I would eat, I would not eat, and I would plan. Oh man, did I plan. Anxiety and I loved staying up late together, like a twisted sleepover, telling scary stories of the future and watching old memories projected onto my brain. I would plan my schedule so tightly that the slightest interruption could send me into a meltdown. (One time, when the coffee place was closed, and with just 10 minutes on hand to find an alternative, anxiety cemented my feet to the floor. It jumbled my thoughts and decision-making processes and sent an earthquake of nerves rumbling through my body. I could not figure out what to do next. I was frozen. This was not the plan! my anxiety cried. I know.)

That is what happened when I attempted to "fix" myself. What made my marriage different was that it was the first time I chose to sit in my anxiety instead of avoiding it. To give it a name. Before, I had felt more comfortable sharing about my past drug abuse and eating disorder than saying the words "I have anxiety." But this time, as I began to explain to my partner what it was like, and he sat quietly and lovingly listened, I finally realized what I had to do.

In my experience, relationships are mirrors, and when you have a partner who can reflect you clearly, you learn a lot about yourself. Once I could own my anxiety, I began to see how much it ruled my life. I had no idea how much it affected me until I started living with someone. When I was single, I could control it through work, food, and planning, but once another human being entered the picture, it was the Wild West of unknown variables.

It meant I could no longer plan my life years in advance since my partner couldn't plan past next week. It meant having to expand my dinner menu beyond two meals and communicating why that is hard for me, even when catatonic with nerves. It meant having to sit in the unknown of the future, including our own. But this time I had a hand to hold on to, something to anchor me.

Anxiety is not me, but it is a part of me. As I sat there explaining this to him, this need to accept it, I realized: How can I ask someone to accept all of me, when I was not accepting all of myself? So I looked across the couch at Anxiety curled in a ball, and I reached out my hand.