#i wish my social anxiety wasnt so bad i tried harder to make friends in college

[butt-puncher]

I wish that I was more

[relativelyanonymousgirl]

Who am I?

If I ever do get a real blog (maybe in a couple of weeks, maybe in a month? we’ll see), then this would be my ‘about me’ page. Probably tumblr has one as well but I’m taking this exploring a blog thing one step at a time. And I already added an image to one of my previous posts so..

So who am I and what am I doing with this blog (and why should you be doing the same?)

Right, let’s skip on the who am i question and get to the interesting stuff. I’m 21, which means for me that I’m in the phase of my life where you have to unlearn all the ‘bad stuff’ your parents raised you with and you kind of have to raise yourself on all the stuff you wish they’d raised you with. I think for some people this happens automatically and probably at a younger age and for some people this doesnt happen at all. But I have wanted to do this (to change) for as long as I remember and it never really seemed to work. Now it is working and I guess I’m taking you all (that would be all the 0 (zero) people that follow this blog and the 0 people I’ve told about this blog) along for the journey. Both for me, because typing shit out makes them more real and makes the changes more real and because I’m learning a lot and I think other people might benefit from the lessons I’m learning.

So what’s the starting point? Like I said, I’m 21 and I just finished my bachelors in artificial intelligence. I spent my last semester in Spain and this is where I realised I couldnt continue living the way I was. I didn’t not only not want to keep living the way I was, but I genuinely couldnt. I think I have anxiety disorder and it’s been interfering with my life in many, many ways. But even if you do not have anxiety disorder, the same mechanisms that are making my life really hard are probably making your life a lot more difficult than it has to be. So in a way I should be grateful for my anxiety because it’s forcing me to explore these concepts that I otherwise wouldn’t have and maybe my life at the end of this journey will be better than Iif I hadn’t been given these obstacles in life. Yeah. Maybe someday I’ll actually believe that.

So anxiety is the big problem and then there are the sideproblems and coping mechanisms that initially, if you’re walking a similar path to mine, you might think are the things ruining your life and are also the things that you want to change so badly, but can’t seem to. You think that doesnt make sense, why can’t I just stop picking my face? Why can’t I stop binging on chocolate? But it’s because I didn’t factor in the underlying reason: the anxiety. So my coping mechanisms aren’t that original probably. Number 1 would be ‘distraction’. Whenever the anxiety kicks in, which ranges from 50% of the time to 100% of the time, I’ll feel stress and fear and I’ll try to distract myself from feeling that and my brain from thinking related thoughts by either looking at memes, scrolling on pinterest or watching series. I would spent literally every minute of my time I’m not doing something and thus occupying my brain on my phone/laptop. Now I’m not saying memes are bad or series are bad, or unhealthy food is bad (woo shocker), it’s all about your relationship with them. Number 2 is food. I am not lying when I say that I would think of food every couple of minutes. And that’s hard. Because it feels like your dieting your life away, every time you have to tell yourself no. Then there is the fact that you have limited self-control. So for example, you have to finish a project for uni. This project in itself is giving you anxiety, of course so you’ll get the desire to eat unhealthy food. Now you can either put your self-control in denying yourself food, or you can put your self-control in working onthe project, both are a lot harder than they should be and both are a lot harder than they are for most other people. Obviously, I chose working on the project, which meant I was always eating a lot of crap when I’m studying. C’est la vie. Number 3 is a bit more strange. I pick my face. I look for any unevenness and god forbid clogged pores and I scratch, pimp and tug on my skin until the unevenness is even and bleeding or the clogging oil is out of the pores. And bleeding. This means my face often looks like a warzone (at least to me) and it’s been one of the harder habits to kick and it’s also the one that makes the least sense to me. I’ve never really cared about appearances much, I wear comfortable clothing (usually from my current boyfriend, and I don’t mean just a cute oversize blouse. I’ll wear his pants and his already oversized sweaters etc. I just care about comfort, which I think is also partly to do with my anxiety), I don’t wear make-up and sometimes I’ll brush my hair. But there have been nights where I laid awake hating my face, wanting it to burn, simply because my skin is not ‘perfect’. Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but that’s how it often is with anxiety. 

Then, what I think lies at the core of my anxiety is fear of failure. And this one is different, because fear of failure I’ve had my entire life. Beating anxiety takes a lot of determination. Just like changing yourself does (not if you follow my amazing advice, that is, I truly believe that change isn’t that hard if only you know how). And I’ve always been able to refer to the person I was ‘before’, so back when I had a healthy relationship with food, I simply didn’t think about my skin at all and seeing my roommates around the house didn’t fill me with a sense of fear and impending danger. If I had been that way before than I could go back to it. I’m stubborn enough to think that if life can change me this way, I’ll change my way back (that’s not how it works, you become someone else, but more about that later). But it’s harder when there is no ‘before’. Because if someone hasn’t showed you that you can change then who are you to believe you can? Well fuck that, I’m me and that’s all I need, I truly believe I can change EVERYTHING and I will keep believing this until proven otherwise, but guess what, since I’ll keep trying until I die, you won’t be able to prove me otherwise. 

Fun fact on this matter actually is that not having this belief can truly, seriously be one of your biggest enemies of change. So apperently it’s a big deal to run a mile in under four minutes and nobody thought it could be done. Until one guy did it. So this ‘barrier’ that stood for decades get broken and less than fifty days later someone else breaks it too. And then a year later, 3 people also break it, in one and the same race. By now, thousands of people have broken that ‘barrier’. It’s not a barrier. It’s your thinking. So stop that. 

So I had Fear of Failure (FoF) all my life and then there were some circomestances (it was high school, big shocker) and then I developed anxiety disorder. I’ve been talking mostly about a lot of symptoms of this mental foe, but there is also of course, the social aspect. And that one is so, so hard. It’s not the worst side-effect for me. I have friends, I know how to make friends, I go out to parties etc. But it’s the one that’s most debilitating. No one can prepare you for this one. For thinking you are not ‘normal’, for never fitting in, for that to even become an option, then a self-fullfilling prophecy and then just a part of who you are. 

It’s also the hardest to change, because you can stop eating food and stop looking at your phone (this is completely the wrong way to go about change, but Im siumplifying) but you cant just ‘feel comfortable’ in social situations. You can’t just ‘increase your self-esteem’, you can’t just ‘set bounderies and feel good about it’. I mean I tried to do the things while ignoring the emotions thinking it would go away. AND THIS DOES NOT WORK. it made it all so much worse. So don’t beat yourself up for ‘isolating’ yourself. Sure, isolation without a solution is gonna make the problem worse and you should definetely still catch up with your close friends and do the things that are light-to-medium-exhausting. But just ‘getting out there’ isn’t gonna make your anxiety go away, it’s just gonna make it worse. That said. You need to actually address the problem if you are noticing that social situations have become harder for you. 

Okay, so this is me. This is where I am at right now. Finishing my bachelor thesis for uni was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, even though the stuff I actually had to do wasnt that hard, but I had to fight for every single word I wrote. I couldn’t have continued to my masters. My parents came to visit and I cried at a restaurant, finally telling them my problem and then I decided to take a year off and focus on getting my life back on track. I’m now four months into this year and there has been many, many changes and definetely not enough. You can read about them here if you want to.

Sidenote. I’m living at my parents, which has its own challenges of course. But it’s been really helpful for me, since I didn’t feel like I had a comfort zone anymore, and this place is the closest thing to a comfort zone and I think it had slowly become one. Well at least my room has. One thing that seems obvious when you want to ‘find yourself’ is to travel, but I don’t think that would have been the best decision for me. I’ll write about that some other time.