So today was a pretty big day for me – I actually got on the phone and make a call about a job. I’m pretty proud of myself. I’m extremely self-conscious about the sound of my voice, and the age of email and Facebook has made it easy for me to avoid talking on the phone.
Social anxiety makes job-hunting extremely difficult and stressful, but I need some sort of regular job. A regular paycheck would go a long way towards reducing a major life stresser (lack of financial security), but more importantly, working with other people would be a great way to continue making progress in my anxiety fight.
Getting a job means being more aggressive on the phone. If you want to stand out as an applicant, you have to be willing to get on the phone and make something happen. Unfortunately, it took me 5 hours to get myself to make the call, in which time I:
- Went to the supermarket
- Wrote three blog posts
- Sent two freelance pitches
- At lunch at McDonald’s (a no no given my recent weight gain!
- Played some Modern Warfare 2 even though it bores the f*ck out of me these days
In other words, I did everything I could to avoid making the phone call, which is bad. One of my regular CBT exercises is to just jump in and do things without staging a massive internal debate. But on the positive side, I didn’t need to go through my usual mental self-mutilation session to do something uncomfortable.
Victory? Yes. A Small Victory. Which is not-so-coincidentally the name of one of my favorite songs:
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