December fourth: I have social anxiety! :D
So. I’ve just arrived home, aka my 14 m2 dorm room, after a visit to the shrink. She’s a very nice older woman, and she has some good points and helps me to visualise my situation from a different perspective. Anywho, today we talked mostly about my “social anxiety”, which is kind of a weird thing of who I am.
As long as I can remember at this point I’ve felt like I didn’t have anything to contribute with in a social interaction, like a party or stuff like that. You know, the feeling of being judged as a weirdo and a “lower person” even before you enter a room or a crowd? That will be me. Most of the time at least. You see, in order to compensate I sought to school work and especially the natural sciences which quickly led to my small thought of being a scientist one day (*ding* Achievement unlocked!). This became a big part of who I was and social relations, like sports and parties outside of school, I tried my best to avoid.
An important fact here is that I ended up getting bullied quite a lot back in primary school which of course is a horrible thing for everyone who has been exposed to that. Another fact is that I grew up quite far out on the countryside on a small island, as you would say in Danish “Derude hvor kraverne vender" which is roughly translated to "where the crows turn around". So all in all it was a fairly small society and you quickly knew more or less everyone and as a consequence the bullying was rather difficult to get away from. To further add gravel to the pile, one of my best friends growing up was among the bullying gang of boys in my class and I guess that somehow has made a larger impact than I thought at that time.
Basically, I don’t have any real self-esteem when it comes to social interactions. I feel highly uncomfortable talking to anyone new, both guys, who I feel judge me as being “the uncool fellow” at first eyesight, and girls, who can’t see anything interesting or attractive in me since I have none. My guess is that it has something to do with my preschool days and the high degree of lacking trust to other people that I seem to possess but who knows. Anyways, this is not always the case!
Interacting while being the “natural science guy” I have no problem interacting with new people. Or for that matter when I step into some kind of role with some predetermined edges and shapes. For instance, when I teach I have absolutely no problem interacting with students that I don’t know and talking in front of three hundred people in an auditorium is no problem. Actually, I even managed to put on a “hat” which made me able to enjoy parties more by helping establish a locale party committee in our research department at the university.
Shiiiit I am losing track here. Need to make these posts shorter xD
The point is that I have a problem with social anxiety now which seems to be rooted quite deep into my skull, and now I have to confront these irrational fears somehow. You need to start somewhere, right? So I’ve been told to write down situations which makes me uncomfortable and why I feel like this at that particular moment. Also, which I haven’t really realised before, I should try to look around at people around me, preferably guys around my age, and see that I might not be the only person feeling lost and confused and awkward at that particular time.
I guess that today’ lesson was that I am not alone about feeling like this and that it might be mixing in with my depression and making it worse. My depression is a sickness, a physical condition, that I haven’t asked for or provoked specifically to hit me. It just did and that doesn’t make me a failure, even though it makes me feel like that most of the time. Somehow I need to get this realisation into the thick and irrational skull of mine.
Yeah, that was a lot of letters… See y’all out there and here’s some nerdy stuff.
