I hope this is the right place to post this. Sorry if this is hard to read at points, I’ll try my best to make it readable, but my grammar was never my strongest side haha.

This feels sort of super weird to talk about. But I guess that I realized this morning that I needed to get it out and I don’t feel comfortable talking to my friends about it, only my mother really knows. I guess I feel I just need to write it down and articulate it to somebody else, I apologize for the wall of text beforehand as this is a fairly long story I guess.

I’m a 22 year old guy from Sweden. I was raised by my mom together with my brother after my dad passed away from brain cancer when I was 8. I was always sort of a shy, awkward guy. But I had my interests and I had friends and had a fairly normal upbringing all things considered. Losing my dad however made me a lot more anxious and I became super terrified of becoming ill myself, because I remember how my dads death affected me, my brother and my mother.

However when I was in my last year of gymnasium (swedish high school) I started having stomach issues, I really don’t wanna get to much into it. For a few months I wouldn’t really tell anyone about it because I didn’t really think that much of it to be honest, at this point it was a fairly negligible thing, I could function fairly well despite all of it. It wasn’t really until a month before my graduation in the spring of 2014 that I started being really anxious about it. I went to the doctor, but since I was so young (18 at the time) they basically just took a few blood tests, which turned out to be normal, and then sent me back home. At first this was very calming, and I had a good graduation and a great summer holiday before starting university, to study to become a teacher.

Now during the fall of 2014 is when I moved away from home, to start in university. I had more general anxiety about my health, basically anything would get me worried, and I wouldn’t really dare to go to the doctor about it. I had an intense fear that I would get bad news, and as I said earlier, I was terrified of how my family would be able to handle it. I was never really scared of death but I was scared of not getting to meet my friends and family again and how it would affect them. These fears were all different from what had worried me during the spring and I was being a hypochondriac. This did however severely hamper my social life, I only really did what was necessary to pass my classes and I would eat bad food as a coping mechanism, I didn’t really meet or talk with my friends, beyond those I knew from the internet. Basically this is how it was until the fall of 2015.

During the fall of 2015 my stomach issues became worse, and while it hasn’t really changed much since then, it did bring back my anxiety in full force. However I still didn’t dare to go to the doctor about it as I was still worried about the response. What it led to however is that I would be bloated and feel gross, so I would, even more than ever before, avoid meeting people. Reflecting on it I think my mind made me go into like a “survival mode” without me doing anything to actually get out of it and get better. And because of how terrible and gross I felt I wouldn’t really take care of myself, I kept eating bad food as a coping mechanism, I didn’t care about how I dressed etc. This made me even more unlikely to get out and meet with people and friends, go to parties. My self confidence was at a rock bottom and it wasn’t getting better.

This is basically how it kept going on until this fall, when I felt so depressed that I couldn’t really deal with it anymore. I went to the doctor. I’m at this point still undergoing some investigations, but the results I’ve gotten so far have been calming - I’m most likely going to be fine! I’m still anxious about it, but it’s better than before. Over the last few weeks I’ve stopped using food as a coping mechanism and I’ve been taking better care of myself in general.

However this is when it really hit me that I’m a 22 year old guy now. I have 1 and a half years left of university until I have to be a high school teacher, and at that point I have to be an adult. How can I be a teacher to kids who are the age that I still feel like I am in my brain? I haven’t really created any deep friendships over this whole time. I haven’t been able to meet a girlfriend or anything like that, partly because I’ve felt gross and been super introverted, but also because I was so scared that I was seriously ill that I didn’t wanna put another person into the same situation as what happened to my family when my dad passed away. I felt that if it was serious I couldn’t really dare to put that sadness and grief on yet another person so I would shield myself away from anything like that. I never really had any relationships like that of note before either due to me always being sort of introverted and shy, even before all of this shit, which makes me feel so inexperienced compared to my peers.

I feel like a 17 year old stuck in a 22 year olds body, I haven’t really done anything that most my age have and as I’ve become less anxious about my health I’ve instead become more anxious over the fact that my schoolmates and friends are in stable relationships, some are engaged, some have kids, some have stable jobs and have bought houses. I’ve been trying hard to eat healthy, exercise and generally take care of myself to raise my confidence in myself, which is at a terrible level, and has been for years. Despite this it feels like a long journey to get there and I feel like the last 4 years of my life went by at super speed, with me standing completely still, almost stuck in time.

Thanks for reading! Sorry about the super long text but it felt nice to be able to get it out anonymously.