It's very rare that a post in just a few words sums up me completely. Sure, there can be stirring poetry or memorable quotes that make you feel good in the meantime. But this one time, something clicked with me.
I share the above and get the handful of likes and laughs you might expect from something like this. But my whole life is emobodied in this quote, and for someone with social anxiety it is even more profound. Because not only do I get anxious about bad things or humiliating circumstances or people hating me (the list really does go on and on), but I also get anxious about anything good as well. And that makes life really hard.
From the day I found out I was pregnant with Benji, I have been terrified of losing him. Convinced I would miscarry or have a still birth. I still have sweat-inducing nightmares on a regular basis that he died at birth and I have been hallucinating his whole life. I wake up from these nightmares, check he's alive, gather him close and sob.
It affects other parts of my life as well. I self sabotage almost everything that starts to feel good and the majority of the time I do without realising until far later. I've enclosed myself in a very small circle and find it extremely hard to make friends. Why put in that effort of getting to know someone, when they will either not be interested in the first place, or worse, we will get close and my open heart who loves everything and everyone will shatter when they realise they don't actually like me at all, and drop me from their lives completely.
It's happened all my life. From "friends" at primary school who started pulling on my hair and kicking at me because I was on a television advertisement, to my best friend at intermediate punching me in the face because I started having my period before she did. From a very early age I learnt that good things tended to end in something terrible happening.
Right through to being an adult and losing my marriage, having multiple partners cheat on me, still having friends turn away... has resulted in a social anxiety which means I have no troubles being in a sea of strangers but I fall apart trying to stammer my way through a conversation with a friend. So instead I stay clear of people and avoid close friendships. I end relationships before they can begin, citing commitment issues or other nonsense, before I start feeling anything good. Because it's going to end anyway, so why risk the heartbreak?
It would be wonderful to get over this kind of anxiety, so I can live and love freely; but life has taught me that as soon as I try it will just crumble again.
So for now my walls stay high. I hold my boy close, I stay in my small circle, and I brace myself for the worst to come; because for me it always lurks around some dark corner, waiting to take it all down.
