________ ________ ________
2018-03-25 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
One of the most difficult things about / _/ / /
social anxiety is the desire to participate. \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
It'd be easy if you just didn't want to, / \/ \/ / \
then anxiety or not who cares, but people / _/ /_ _/
are generally social creatures and people /- / _/ /
with anxiety are largely no different, but \________/\________/\___/____/
with anxiety you face two significant
problems; the first, obvious one being a reluctance to participate. That
mental barrier that knocks you back before you even begin, prevents you from
even entertaining the idea of doing anything social and, to be honest, in some
cases helps you cope without them and keeps you in comfy spaces and a comfy
mindset.
The other, less apparent one is the incessant, unwelcome mental feedback
that arises when you do overcome that first hurdle and participate in
something social. Joining a club, chatting to someone at a show or even
casual, innocuous things like posting on a forum or joining a chat room brings
in its wake waves of savage self-hatred tinged discomfort. Everything you said
was stupid, everything you wrote was wrong, everything you wore was ugly.
Everyone around you hates you.
You don't belong.
Anyway that's where I'm at right now. Good times.
It doesn't help that I feel like I've got no place to retreat to lately to
try and deal with this, work is consuming me and weekends are an uncomfortable
crunch of mental exhaustion and trying to outpace depression and my usual
coping mechanisms (ie. alcohol and pain killers) are unsustainable so for the
most part are out of the picture. I feel like all I'm doing right now is
existing. Occupying space. I know I need to fix it but I just don't have the
energy so I just let every day carry on like the last.
I've got a long break coming up but in the back of my mind is the what-if
dread that it won't be enough, just a longer weekend that once over will just
leave me back to the grind of the day-to-day.
I don't know what to do.
Back in 2000-ish I had a kind of mental break, depression got that bad that
I just buckled under it and went under for probably two or three years, just
sleeping all day on my mom's floor, doing not much more with my days than
watching TV, eating and breathing.
I guess the "grown up" thing to do would be to get off my ass and talk to a
doctor about all this but, circling back to the start of this post, there's
that barrier I have to push through first. Either way I hope to whatever's
listening that I can figure out how to deal with this before something like
that happens again.
Anyway, Debbie Downer out, stay real. End of fuckin' file. <3
