Despite outward appearances that your life is perfect, what's your big struggle?

I have a few:

  • I have bipolar disorder. Not many people know and when I do tell people, they comment that they never would have thought this from their initial impressions. I don't think this is because I have a strong command over its effects at all, rather, I am more private than people understand about my emotional life (of course they can't realise this - because I keep so much under wraps), and in spite of advances in the reception of mental illnesses, I still believe the disorder is much-maligned and poorly understood. You can't see something in somebody when you don't really appreciate what it entails. This isn't a criticism of those close to me at all, by the way; if anything, it's a lamentation of the lack of awareness about bipolar, and my own emotional reservations.
  • I over-reflect a terrible amount and this manifests in every aspect of my life. I get a lot of anxiety about things as a result and can act out in response to perceived (but groundless) problems, in a manner which actually creates problems that weren't there in the first place. I also worry that by trying to analyse how and why I over-think, I am just engaging in over-thinking again, and making the problem so much worse. I have recently gotten into a new relationship and ongoing concerns about being too clingy or too distant have caused me to have waves of variously drawing away, and being overbearing, often in response to fears that I am doing the other thing. I need to learn to put things to rest or how to generally stop these thought processes from spiraling.
  • I am coming up to a life milestone (university graduation) and for the first time in my life, I haven't got a plan in place for what happens next. In spite of coming across to people as confident and very much in charge of my own life, the uncertainty deeply bothers me, and fears of failure and the unknown are affecting me more and more as this point gets closer. I have a lot of existential anxiety and angst right now.

Trying to subscribe to everybody else's belief that you are confident, or clever, or successful, or that you will be fine is incredibly hard when you aren't convinced they know the true you. I want to let go of this perspective and accept that I am equally partial, and have an equally distorted perspective of myself, but this is a work in progress.

/r/AskWomen Thread