People have often told me that I don’t come across as an anxious person or someone who lacks confidence. To be fair, I think I may be better at acting than I think and perhaps I am not always fully honest about how I’m feeling depending on the situation. That is one of the reasons why I decided to start writing this blog, to help me to be more honest about my experiences.

One well known issue is how we interpret people from how they appear on social media, always smiling, having a lot of friends and lots of interesting things in their bio, all giving the impression that their life is great. Something that only dawned on me fairly recently is that most people have to be asked to smile for photos and you never see the before and after a photo is taken.

This is a selfie of me on the train back from London about a month ago. It’s not the best photo of me but I think I look fairly happy and relaxed after a few days away celebrating the end of placement (I can’t remember why I wanted to take a photo though!). However, about an hour or so after this photo was taken, I had a fairly big panic attack to the point where I thought I was going to throw up. I felt like this because I have developed anxiety around being stuck in the same place for too long and in this particular example when the Wifi is patchy and there is a limited number of other things that you can do! You also probably wouldn’t be able to tell that I was also quite stressed about things that I had to when I got back home, that I had failed my placement just the week before and that I was generally feeling quite unwell as I often get travel sick. I imagine a lot of you have photos like this and I hope this demonstrates that you never know how someone is really feeling and that pictures and how people appear in real life can be deceptive.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you find it helpful. As always, feel free to get in touch with any questions/feedback, I always love to hear it.

Until next time

Kathryn