In this post, “Bridgett” shares her story, in her own words as part of the Voices series. As a reminder, sharing with anonymity is still authentic, the act of sharing is what matters. I am sitting on a plane, leaving vacation. My first trip to Europe in over 25+ years, frankly. You want to talk about work stress. I almost cancelled this trip of a lifetime. Why? Oh, well see there is this massive tech event.

In this post, Newsha Taheri shares her story, in her own words as part of the Voices series. I’ve been a worrier all my life! I moved to Los Angeles around 20 years ago, still a teenager. What I imagined about immigration wasn’t aligned with reality, and immigration to the U.S was more complicated than I thought. I felt very lonely; although I had all my immediate family here, I wanted to have my best friends around me, and I was too young and naive to build my support system.

I’ve always been a nervous person, worrying about things, overthinking, finding it difficult to “trust the system” or “trust by default”. It has lead to situations where behaviors kick in that are … suboptimal. In 2012 after a particularly intense series of situations at work, I started to have physical symptoms like sweats, racing heart, thudding heart, feelings of impending doom, low level agoraphobia. I went to my doctor and neither of us understood what was happening.