My Social Anxiety

Note: this post is permanently under construction because my history with social anxiety disorder is very long, and very complicated. It’s a basic history of my life with Social Anxiety Disorder and there are many holes in it.

SA is a biggie, and it’s been far more disruptive to my life than my OCD.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a shy person, avoiding attention as much as possible. Even when I was a young child, I felt very disconnected from the world around me, and that showed in the solitary activities I enjoyed – playing with Legos, playing video games, stuff like that.

Growing up on a block full of kids, I always had people to hang out with because we were all kind of thrown together. But I never made many friends outside of situations where friendship just sort of happened by necessity. Friendship takes effort and I was always too self-conscious to put myself forward.

Things got very bad for me in the 8th grade, when I began being bullied every day in school. It took a major toll on my self-esteem and ability to communicate. I felt ashamed of being a target so I kept it a secret from my family. I felt even more ashamed for not standing up for myself.

I came up with a simple solution – work my ass so I could get into a private school elsewhere in the city. By doing this, I wouldn’t get dumped in a high school full of the same @ssholes that abused me in junior high. My grades shot up, and I almost cried when I got my acceptance letter to my target school.

Once 9th grade started, my modus operandi appeared almost instinctively. I put my head down and shunned attention. After the hell that was 8th grade, all I wanted was to blend in. I was a good, but never outstanding student. I avoided most extra-curricular activities like the plague.

In high school, I made some new friends in a different school, but I never felt like one of the gang. I couldn’t ever put my finger on the problem, but I always felt like an outsider. My nagging brain kept me from opening up. While I liked many of them very much, and still miss them, I feel a deep sense of regret that I ever really let them know me. I hid my problems from them, even deadly serious ones like a family member suffering from a deadly form of cancer. It’s weird what social anxiety can do to you.

One tried to get in touch with me via Facebook a few months ago, but I quietly rejected the friend request. In many ways, I feel a deep sense of shame over my history with social anxiety. I was never successful at being a good friend to somebody else. I never opened up enough to let him really know me.

College was a disaster for me socially. I commuted to my school so there wasn’t a dorm environment where I could meet new people. Truth-be-told, I should have gone away to school but I was just plain scared. I had a girlfriend throughout college, but made very very few friends.

That relationship lasted 5 years, but probably should have ended much much sooner. I don’t know, maybe we were just both looking for a companion. But I couldn’t ever bring myself to open up to her. I’ve often regarded her as cold when speaking about her. But that’s wrong. She didn’t understand me, but that was my fault for not opening up. I don’t think I understood back then just how bad I was at connecting to others.

When I really look back hard, I see that my social skills gradually got worse and worse as I’ve gotten older. I probably bottomed out in 2008 after my career fell apart (another LONG story), but I think I’m on my way forward…