Anxiety , Panic and me

I've reached the grand old age of 33 now and for as long as I can remember I've always had times where I've felt nervous or anxious over what could be silly little things or even for no reason at all.
To compensate then I've always kept it to myself  , locked away those feelings inside and pushed myself to carry on regardless and as a result I've gone most of my life feeling a bit ashamed of myself for being "weak"

That attitude culminated in me getting myself to the point where I was self medicating with alcohol to the point where I became very worried that I had a drinking problem . I moderated my drinking eventually and once my safety blanket was taken away then ironically it was then that anxiety attacks and panic attacks jumped out of their box , threw me over their shoulders and bundled me onto a rollercoaster ride which lasted just over a year and completely took over my life

It wasn't until I realised four months ago that I had become fearful of the anxiety and panic  itself that I began to be able to start to learn the skills I needed to deal with the attacks and then they lessened slowly but surely to the point where I still have them as mild feelings every now and then but I'm not terrified of them which means their power is limited    

I read someones blog recently and the sentence " you are only as sick as your secrets " seemed to leap out of the screen and burn itself into my eyeballs and I decided that now would be a good time to get everything out there and blog my little heart out and find other people like me

I'm not weak  , panic and anxiety is not a character defect and I'm not going to be ashamed any more about suffering from it