Identity and Anxiety

For my whole life, I have always thought that I am just a very anal person. Other children in primary school would talk back to the teachers, and I would get second-hand fear watching them get told off. In college, people not revising and skipping lessons bothered me too intensely, I feared for everyone else's education, even if I disliked the person.
Recently, I was watching my favourite show, Brooklyn-99, and the characters were faced with unjust circumstances; and all I could think was "Tell a grown-up! That's against the rules!"

Although I do think that some of my personality traits are just me, I feel that my need for structure and order and fairness is primarily due to my anxiety. I think that some of this reflection came from Lucy Moon's article on her blog, which you can read here. This triggered me to reconsider some situations I have been in throughout my life, and I connected the feeling of being afraid of other people being told off, and my current feelings of anxiety- now that I'm able to identify them.

My mental health ebbs and flows, sometimes the depression follows me like a cloud, but I've never considered that my anxiety affects my life so severely. I have always just been under the impression that I am a bit peculiar, or a bit too orderly and bossy. Now however, I realise that I need order and fairness and control in order to predict situations and make me feel less like the world is going to collapse if I don't have a schedule for everything.

I think sometimes, I lose sight of the bigger picture in favour of the details, and it tends to cloud my judgement of people and situations. "Yes, I had a great time with my friend, but they left their shoes in the middle of the floor and they were five minutes late and they left mugs everywhere and the bathroom light on and..."
Being in the moment is much more important than making sure my entire life revolves around a schedule, and although I don't think I'll ever be okay with being late, sometimes I don't have to leave 20 minutes earlier than necessary "just in case".

Anxiety affects different people in different ways- some are concerned with their looks, some worry about tests, some, like me, worry about control. But anxiety shouldn't stop me from enjoying my life, and put me in difficult circumstances in which my own brain is holding me back from everything.
I plan to continue to work on my bossy ways, and to let Ben be his own beautiful self, as long as he lets me write the Christmas present list in August.