What It’s Like to Live With Chronic Anxiety

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Sarah Wilson knows anxiety. She was 12 years old when she was first diagnosed with childhood anxiety. In the more than three decades since, she has been diagnosed with insomnia, bulimia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, hypomania, and bipolar disorder. All of these conditions, as she writes in her memoir about her journey through anxiety, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, are “just different flavors” of the same thing.

Anxiety is one of the most common mental-health disorders in the United States, affecting about 18 percent of the population each year. In the video above, Wilson shares with the Cut how the condition has profoundly affected her life, and how she has managed to make it, as she says, “beautiful.”

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What It’s Like to Live With Chronic Anxiety