Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

I have to admit, this isn't something I've ever thought about, actually. I looked up some of the symptoms of GAD to see where they may be able to correlate and it's rather interesting. This is the link I'm going from: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/generalized-anxiety-disorder/symp...

I would guess being nervous all the time and easily getting irritable, those used to be things that I thought were just part of my personality because that's how I was for a number of years. Ever since getting my medication regulated, I haven't really noticed that I have those near as much so those symptoms must have been there and I thought it was part of my personality. The nervousness hasn't completely gone away and I think it's because it's been there for so long with me.

If I look through the child/teen sections in that article, good lord I must have had anxiety since I was about 10 because so much of that I remember feeling when I was younger. I think this breaks into the fact of growing up with mental illness and how we may actually adopt certain traits and symptoms into our personalities because we are living with them every day and we are used to them.

You know how, if you are around certain people often, you can tend to take on some of their traits as your own? I think that's what growing up with mental illness can do, but likely to even more of a degree because it's all within yourself. If you have these feelings every day, at what point do you start to say that that's who you are, especially if you don't know you have a mental illness?