Anxiety and a Training Contract

What I wish I knew about anxiety in my early 20s

You shouldn’t be here. I mean look at everyone around you. They are confident. They are smart. They have achieved things you could never have dreamed.

You analyse everything they have that you do not. You stay quiet and you smile. You do your best to play the part, but you go home beating yourself up. If only, I was more organised, more interesting to be around, more charismatic. If only, I didn’t suffer from anxiety. 

You are terrified of getting things wrong. You make a mistake at an event and you spend hours thinking about how you could have done things differently. You want this so bad and yet you dread the open days, the interviews and the schemes. Your heart is pounding. You feel sick. It’s hard to fall asleep.

But you can’t speak about this. It’s embarrassing. You hate this about yourself. You go to these events and you put on a front to be your best self, but deep down you are waiting to be found out. 

Even when you get the training contract: yes, you did it. Yes, people tell you that you deserve it. But you get closer to the start date and you’re not sure anymore. They don’t know what you’re really like. You got lucky with the questions. Wait until they see the real you.

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I don’t speak much about anxiety. This is partly because it’s something I still face. And as much as I wish there wasn’t, there is still shame involved. 

But things have changed. And here is what I would tell myself if I was going through this journey again. 

One reason this is so hard right now is because you are entering a world that is new and glamorous. You are surrounded by smart, confident people who have had time to develop the skills you feel insecure about and you are competing for something that isn’t fully in your control. I wish you didn’t have to deal with anxiety, but it would also be strange if you didn’t struggle during this time given how much you are pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. 

There is a difference between feeling these feelings and concluding that you are fundamentally not good enough. You are enough. As you spend more time in this process, you will develop the skills you want to develop until you become more comfortable with yourself. Right now, you are going to concentrate on the things you feel self conscious about, which is why I want you to focus on your strengths for now. You will have a long time to work on the things you need to work on.

You see a world where it looks like everyone knows what they are doing, but that’s not true. Everyone is just doing their best. What I will say is that the things that look impossible right now, the way that lawyers speak about things and how knowledgeable they seem, look that way because they have had years of practice. 

Keep going. Sometimes, this feels like the bare minimum, that there are all these other things you should be doing, from changing who you are to changing the world. But every time you show up and achieve something that you weren’t otherwise able to do, you have made progress. The anxiety drops a fraction as you teach yourself the difference between your thoughts about who you are and what was possible, and the reality, which is that you are able to do a lot more than you think. 

One thing I am asking myself right now is, “What would I do were it not for anxiety?”. When the time is right, this can be a helpful shortcut to facing it head on.

Finally, not all of these thoughts will make sense or apply. There are going to be periods where the anxiety is in full force. I still get that too. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is to know that you are not alone.