Anxiety runs my life unconsciously

I've always known that I have more anxiety than the regular person, but I always felt like it was manageable and that it wasn't impacting my life significantly so I didn't worry too much about it.However, I've come to the realisation that it's running my life even though I wasn't aware of it.So basically I'm a very chill person towards everything in life. I never get anxious or upset over what people normally are affected by. I see people worried for the pandemic, or financially, or because of elections, but my outlook on life has been "we'll get there". I don't mind failing or going through hardship because I see it as normal and even good, as it makes life all the more satisfying when we get over hardship.Ok so let's go for the dark side. Death.Ever since I remember it is my biggest fear and I'm now seeing how it is the root of my anxiety. Basically, what's the point? I'm not religious and don't believe in afterlife or whatever. So basically as I see it, we are all here growing and striving for more and better, to improve ourselves and to overcome hardship, but in the end we'll rot and become nothing and to me that's almost like a sick game. I also don't care about all those things people tell themselves like "leaving things for the humans who'll come after us" (like I don't care for the humans after especially since they'll die too) and "you are made of atoms that'll roam the universe forever so in the end you won't really be gone" (again I soundly care for atoms in the slightest)And there's that, I see life as amazing. There's so much good stuff to experience and the hard horrible stuff will make us stronger in this very nice balance of happiness and sadness that builds our human foundation, however, it'll all be gone and it'll be for nothing.When I have times where I think about this a lot I eventually manage to pull myself out and in the end these period only last a couple of weeks every few years so I felt that as I said before that my anxiety wasn't that bad. I basically had some episodes from time to time and that was it so no need to worry about it too much.Recently I found out that that isn't the case. In the long time between episodes I'm not "anxiety free" is just that I cope with death anxiety by channeling it to all areas of life in unconscious ways.I see that I cope by telling myself that I'm ok with dying as long as I do the most with my life. Almost like if I'm going to die I want to define what's important to me and put the effort it takes to experience it. Basically, I've developed a "perfect life" mentality. I have to have a perfect life because I don't want to die without achieving everything that is important to me.Because of this I lead a life unconsciously driven by anxiety and it manifests in several ways.First it's something I feel like it's almost OCD. Everything that I don't like but can't change makes me so anxious because it's literally something signalling to me that I won't achieve this life I'm designing for myself. The biggest examples here are my problem with body image and collecting. Basically, I will only have one life to feel beautiful and I really enjoy that and what comes with that, I enjoy fashion and make up and hair but I have a lot of stretch marks from puberty and there is no treatment that will get rid of them so I feel like as much as I try to improve myself I'll have these forever and basically my "perfect life" will never happen. Also the idea of getting old and ugly really pains me because wrinkles are also permanent which means that not only will I have to die, I can't even live my 70ish years being fulfilled in that aspect. Apart from that I see that I'm also extremely perfectionist regarding my interests. I love decorating my room and home but I'm always annoyed that it's never perfect and apart from that I enjoy video games and Kpop, both of which release so much limited content that I can't afford all the time, and after those items are gone I'll never have them and, again, no matter how much effort I want to put into improving my skills and enjoying the things I like, my enjoyment is capped not at the end, but by an invisible wall of content I'll never have. Like no matter how much time I put developing my skills at my favourite games, I'll never be able to fully enjoy all the content because there's always stuff that I missed.Lastly, I feel like I can't put myself out there as much because I'm extremely perfectionist. Some of my goals include wanting to dance and maybe have a Youtube channel but I always cringe at myself. I feel like my own self perception and my goals never align with how I see myself from an outside perspective so I always find my image in pictures and videos bad and my work not that great. I don't know if this makes sense but it's not fear of judgement, it's more that I just feel like I can't put out to the world work that is good for my standards, basically that the perception that others and myself will have or have from my work is not how I truly feel inside and what I want to do​In the end I really don't know what to do. I feel like I should get help (and I'm being followed by a therapist) but in the end I feel like I don't want to. I don't want to feel like this and even reading this I see how unrealistic it sounds but I feel like if I get help and change it I'll stop being myself. How can I give up on my goals? How am I supposed to give up on my convictions and things that I want without losing what I feel like is my fundamental need to live a life in which I fulfil my desires. via /r/Anxiety https://ift.tt/2Gq1S4s