What a Life This Is - A Collection of Short Stories

Kojiro Headcannons: Kojiro's Anxiety

- In this AU, Kojiro suffers from anxiety instead of Kaoru. Mostly because I wanted to explore what it would be like for a person with his outgoing playboy personality, to also be hiding/dealing with the struggles of having an anxiety disorder.

- Karou is the only one in their family (other than maybe Kadence) who fully understands Kojiro's anxiety. He hasn't really talked about it with Miya and Reki because he thinks they're too young to get it, although they are aware that sometimes their dad gets, "overwhelmed," as Karou puts it.

- It took both Kojiro and his parents a while to realize that he had an actual anxiety disorder, because he taught himself to hide the symptoms (that he didn't really know he had) over the years.

- He does have some symptoms that he can't really hide. Psychological ones such as over-analyzing, lack of concentration, and restlessness, and physical ones such as chewing on his lips, fidgeting, nausea and sweating

- He kind of has two personalities, Joe and Kojiro. The loud, mischievous persona that he uses in public- also known as "Joe," is a cover-up, and is drastically different from his real personality

- On the other hand, Kojiro is shy, fidgety, easily flustered, a worrier/over-analyzer, and basically the opposite of Joe, and really only comes out when he's at home.

[A/N: Kojiro does NOT have dissociative identity disorder, he just acts differently depending on where he is/who he's around. Like how people act differently depending on which group of friends they're with, or how a person acts at work vs how they act at home.]

- Kojiro's anxiety wasn't particularly triggered by anything, but it probably began to take over a big part of his life when he was in elementary school. He was bullied a lot for his "weakness," and because of his hair, the other students called him "Broccoli Head."

- In high school, it got worse, because he was stressing about what he was going to do with himself when he graduated.

- He stopped going to therapy in college because he couldn't afford it, and that's when things truly escalated to a dangerous point. During this time, Kojiro pretty much went down this terrible mental spiral of anxiety and depression due to stress and feeling like he wasn't in control of his life.

- Thankfully, he's doing much better now, but sometimes he can feel himself falling back into that state. Nowadays he goes to therapy and takes anxiety meds and anti-depressants, and he has Karou and his family to keep him grounded.