I always thought that I had low confidence, or poor social skills. For the longest time in my teens I thought I just wasn’t good at conversation. I envied my high school peers for their confidence and the worry free chats they were able to enjoy. For me most interactions were draining not because of what was going on around me, but because of what was happening in my head.
Here’s a story of what could’ve been a simple and pleasant exchange with a classmate, but what was instead a painful mess of overinterpreting, overthinking, and overanalysing.
16 year old Seb. 10AM at school. My classmates and I are standing outside the exam hall, spread out in our different social groups, waiting to be let in. I’m standing with the more studious of the groups, last minute revising some concepts with them. Satisfied, I decide to walk over to a different group, of which I was also a part, hoping to chat casually before the exam. Immediately, someone there jokes with me to “go back to my actual friends, the nerdier guys, go be with them”. I didn’t see this coming, and I didn’t see it for what it was - a joke.
I took it as literally as one could. As a final statement on behalf of the whole group. That I was being rejected. That there was no place for me here. That I was grossly inadequate and unwanted. My mind imploded. It felt like the ground beneath me was starting to shake, forming a fault line around me and only me. I felt at fault, and my body reacted accordingly; my shoulders shrugged, my eyes looked down and my posture locked up. My friend didn’t know how to react. Others around me weren’t sure either. Concerned and puzzled looks surrounded me, deepening that fault line. This of course reinforced my anguish, and further fragmented the social landscape I thought I knew, its tectonic plates moving away from me in all directions. It was a very lonely feeling.
15 seconds and counting since the initial joke. I, still the centre of attention, stood there, hunchbacked, my mind the epicentre of the quake shaking up my social life and displacing my feelings. The tremors inside persisted; “I’m messing up”, “I’m not being cool”, “I’m not playing along”, “He meant that”, “They think I’m weird”, “I’m being awkward”, “This is it”, “There’s no going back”, “They’ll never want to be friends with me again”. Finally, someone changes the subject and the group’s attention shifts, leaving me alone, reeling in the aftershocks of whatever just happened.
This is one of my strongest memories of what I now know to call social anxiety. I didn’t have that label back then. I had numerous moments like the one above. For every few minutes that passed in those interactions, I went through hours of rumination afterwards. Overthinking every minor detail and what I could’ve done better. Posture, word choice, tone of voice, outfit, eye contact, etc. When it rained, it poured.
I can’t remember when I started calling it social anxiety. If it was my therapist, or some self-help book. Hearing that term brought me immense relief. Over the years since high school, through uni, and now as an “adult” my relationship with that label has evolved. My general confidence has increased, overpowering those parts of my brain that did me wrong back when I was 16.
Not completely though. I still have moments. I overthink an interaction with a friend or colleague. I ruminate on something I said. Very reliably, this is always worse if I’m tired, tipsy or stressed. For me at least, those three always roll back the clock on the abovementioned evolution.
It’s interesting to consider what you got out of your mental ill health. We always think about the bad, because we call these things diseases or conditions(and fair enough that we do). But what about the good? I can confidently say that being so socially anxious made me a more thorough person. It made me more attentive to others. It made me appreciate the complexities of emotional life. These are all things which form a large part of who I am today, and would never give up. Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon - arguably one of the best books on depression out there - once wrote:
“On the happy day when we lose depression, we will lose a great deal with it. If the earth could feed itself and us without rain, and if we conquered the weather and declared permanent sun, would we not miss grey days and summer storms? As the sun seems brighter and more clear when it comes on a rare day of English summer after ten months of dismal skies than it can ever seem in the tropics, so recent happiness feels enormous and embracing and beyond anything I have ever imagined. Curiously enough, I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it.”
This is not a call to stop fighting your social anxiety, or any other mental health struggle you’re going through. Consider it a dose of optimism that one day we will all look back at our struggle and rumination, and we will appreciate what they’ve done for us. Which really just means what we’ve done for ourselves, because they’re one and the same.
This ended up being longer that I anticipated, but it felt good to write. Thanks for getting this far with me. How do you relate to your social anxiety? Do you think it’s done any good for you? Does it change when you’re tired, tipsy, or stressed?