A First Glance

I can’t really remember a time in my life when I wasn’t effected by social anxiety. It manifested itself in so many ways, and I never really understood what I was going through until I had turned 20. Even as a kid, people would always make comments about how quiet and shy I was. I had a lot of personality and I was constantly running around the house being silly and loud. But if I had never spent a ton of time around a person, I was considered very “bashful” and “modest.”

It wasn’t until high school that I really started to have trouble with my anxiety. I still had no idea why I was always so stressed out and why I couldn’t seem to do school assignments like everyone else I was surrounded by. I had trouble doing group assignments because I was always afraid to say the wrong thing, and I would often not participate because the fear of being judged freaked me out so much. Speeches were the end all for me. I would spend so much time stressing out about public speaking, that it’s all I would think about. On the day that I was supposed to do my speech, I wouldn’t be able to eat. I’d get so nervous that I felt like I was going to vomit. When I’d go up in front of the class, my hands would get clammy and I would start shaking, and I would stumble over words. There’s smaller things that affected my daily life that caused a lot of inward turmoil that I don’t think a lot of people really talk about. But, whenever I was in class, or in the cafeteria, I would sit incredibly still, as to not attract unwanted attention to myself. I didn’t go to school dances, join clubs, makes friends, or pass classes because I was always afraid of social interactions. I was afraid of looking like a loser who didn’t have friends and I was terrified of being stuck in that moment by myself.

It’s pretty normal to get nervous sometimes. Especially for bigger things like job interviews, dates, public speaking. It’s ok and normal to be nervous. But when that nervousness starts to get in the way of your every day life, it becomes a problem. I always felt weird and out of place and I never thought I would find anyone on this planet who struggled with the same anxieties as I did, and I can’t tell you how amazing I felt when I had first discovered what social anxiety is. I had been doing research on ways to feel more confident in social settings when I had stumbled across social anxiety and from there, I was scouring the web to read more and more about it. I had never read something that accurately described how I felt all the time, every waking moment of my life, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like I was completely alone. From there, the real journey started and a couple years later I was signing up for therapy to get help.

In the last year, I’ve discovered healthy ways to cope with social anxiety. I still have bad days, where I really struggle, but when days like that happen, they don’t feel like the end of the world. I’m constantly listening to my thoughts for negative thinking patterns and trying to tell myself that things are ok when I start to get too hard on myself. My goal in writing this blog is to help other people cope with their anxieties, and if I can help even one person, I will consider this blog a success. Thank you for reading, and until next time, cheers!