Liza Koshy On Opening Up

Transcript

Hey guys, what's up? It's Liza Koshy, and today I'm gonna tell you a little story about my anxiety. So I turned 20, I had been moved out to LA. I was doing different stuff out here and having fun, just being myself until anxiety hit me like a brick. Mine specifically is social anxiety which is ironic for the job that I have as a social influencer. Talking to a camera was something that always made me feel comfortable. Talking to a camera right now is much better than me talking to a person because I'm a socially anxious person so dealing with my anxiety was hard and I'm still dealing with it, but it's not something that can't be dealt with. I have a friend who opened up to me about his OCD and it was something that was very tough for him to open up about because he had never opened up to anybody about it before. And I completely related to that because I had been holding in my feelings about my anxiety for an entire year. It just started this free-flow of conversation between both of us about my anxiety, about his OCD, about these two things that we didn't know about each other. We thought we knew each other so well, but it wasn't until we opened up about our mental health that we really, really connected even more. Now we actually have a code name whenever I'm feeling anxious or whenever he's having his thoughts, It's called Tiffany, it's just like, "Hey Tiffany's here, she's freakin' here man." It feels good to be able to label something and put it away in your brain rather than let it become your entire brain in itself. Everybody has some sort of mental health to take care of. It is a part of your health. It's something that you live with and that's something that you learn to deal with by opening up to people about it. It allowed me to understand myself more as a person, allowed me to accept that it's a part of me rather than pushing it off and saying, "No, this isn't me, this isn't me." It's a part of me and it's something that I'll always live with and deal with, but it doesn't define me.