I can still remember three years ago when, after a full year of blood work and urine samples and tedious medical examinations, my doctor asked me if the nausea in my stomach felt more like butterflies. The answer I gave completely changed everything.

Hand in hand with society anxiety came the depression, and I was experiencing things typically twelve year olds don’t experience. Shouldn’t experience. I was put in medication, with a dosage that continually increased as the year ticked by, and recommended a shrink. Before anything was really figured out, my entire life was picked up and moved across the country. New doctors, new surroundings, new everything. Since then, I’ve been through three different therapists and started at two new schools, and still managed to overcome my anxiety. And here’s how.

Be open. Everyone gets nervous meeting new people, presenting in front of groups or talking to older, “more important” people like teachers. People with social anxiety experience these nerves, just to an extreme and more often. If you talk about your nervousness, it’s likely other people have been or are nervous about the same thing, even if they don’t have social anxiety. Talking about these things and learning how other people have overcome them will help calm you down and allow yourself to face whatever comes at you.

Know your symptoms. Everyone’s social anxiety makes them feel differently. Some people get shaky, some people get sweaty, some people get dizzy. For me, my key symptom was feeling nauseous. This is why, when I complained to my mom, we originally thought it was some sort of stomach problem. Once we realized the nausea was my social anxiety, it was a lot easier to stop using it as an excuse to miss school and opt out of social situations. Once you know your symptoms, you can remind yourself that it’s a normal thing that you experience and that it can’t hurt you unless you let it.

Embrace it. I spent a lot of time denying that my social anxiety impacted my day to day life the way it did. I thought that my social anxiety just made me a little awkward, a little quirky. But every morning, when I woke up for school feeling nauseous I would claim I was sick and refuse to go to school. Once I’d accepted that it was just the way I felt when I was anxious, things got a lot easier. I’d felt nauseous before social situations countless times, and never once had it actually affected me or made me throw up. My social anciety and the symptoms it came with were my constant companions before social events, and as soon as I realized it wasn’t going to go away without something changing, I embraced it and eventually it did.

Off-days happen. Some days will be worse than others. One day, you might have no problem presenting in front of an audience, and maybe the next day you can’t even get to school. It’s all part of the process of getting better, and soon your definition of a bad day now would have been your definition of a great day then. Whatever happens, always put your mental health above everything else. Taking the occasional mental health day to recharge is perfectly okay, even if it means missing a day of school. If it means in order to avoid a meltdown, you have to miss out on a party you promised your friend you’d go to, it’s perfectly okay. There will always be another day of school, there will always be another party.

Social anxiety can prevent you from doing many things you’d otherwise enjoy in life. It makes things that most people find enjoyable, like parties, a challenge. The only way things get better is if you get to know the constant companion that is social anxiety, and never let it control you. Sometimes I will actually have to say “screw you, social anxiety” under my breath in order to get to class. Over time, you’ll find out what works for you and you’ll learn how you can get better. Because you will get better.