Unfiltered Story #260667

I have very bad anxiety that is undiagnosed, and the only person who truly knows how bad it is is my best friend. She is extremely supportive and helps me calm down during my anxiety attacks and episodes, but since most of them happen when she’s not here with me, I had to think of another coping method. Since the anxiety tends to get worse when I talk about it, I haven’t told my family, meaning I can’t get the help I need. This may sound silly, but I’ve made up an imaginary service dog to help me out. I berate myself constantly saying “I’m just making a big deal out of a little anxiety, I’m being inconsiderate of people with real disabilities ” and since my bff has a disability “why should I get an service dog and [friend] doesn’t?” and all that, but my imaginary dog still helps me so I continue to use her. I named her Rocket and she’s a large chocolate lab. I photoshopped a chocolate lab to become her so I could see her, and I made her my screensaver on my phone. My family has not asked any rude questions such as “why do you have a service dog on your phone?” And since I’m in constant fear that they will, I came up with a backup plan. My bff and I play a game called community, which is exactly as it sounds like. It’s a role play-type game where we’ve created our own community. Since we both are into service dog and disability awareness and she has a disability herself, it would not be surprising if we trained service dogs in Community as our jobs. I explained Rocket to her and asked her to go along with the plan and she agreed. I also made a tag for Rocket with her name, job, my name, etc. and when I asked my dad if I could get the tags (which were originally made for house keys so you could put your name and address on them) he only asked what I needed them for and when I gave the vague answer of “dog tags” he only remarked that they’d be awfully big for a dog (They’re two inches long) and bought them for me. Rocket has helped me through multiple anxiety episodes and I would just like to thank my family for not being nosy, my bff for going along with my plan, and all of them for just letting Rocket and I do our thing without a big fuss.