My Experience with Social Anxiety so far

Hi all,

This thread post will be about my experience with social anxiety from my perspective. I will preface this with a few points:

1) I have not been formally diagnosed with the disorder, however with taking a few online quizzes, looking at some self-help stuff and comparing my experience with certain situations with close friends has lead me to the somewhat okay-ish conclusion that I may have it.

2) Following from the first point, I was assessed for Asperger's, but considered to be borderline and more on the side of no, the main point given for this potential diagnosis was my quietness. I can see why I was assessed for it but social anxiety in my opinion is a much better description of my experience than Aspergers.

3) I'll be going into a pretty high amount of detail about my experience. I'm not really expecting people to respond to this, its more for me to try and articulate my experience and if I ever do summon up the confidence (and time) to speak to a listener, I may point to part of this from time to time

4) Due to the fact that I've not really talked to anyone about this, many of my coping mechanisms will be rather... "unconventional" and may be unhelpful in the long run, or may only help people like me so I will mention that this is not intended to be direct advice to other people on the exact methods to deal with this. However, it would be reasonable to read about this just for the sake of having another perspective on the whole thing.

5) I'm currently 18, male and attending my first year of university to give you a general timescale of events

6) This gets very ramble-y and just sort of becomes my life story (writing this about halfway through the thing), so sorry about that.

With that very long preface done, I'll now go onto the much longer part of talking about my anxiety.

While I was much younger, I was a pretty shy kid. During nursery (pre-school) and play groups I'd prefer to either 1) stay by myself 2) stay near friends that I trusted or 3) stay near my older brother. Being not only shy but an introvert makes me want to seek solitude much more often than your average extravert, yet people would always encourage me to keep making new friends and such. At school at age 5-8 I was always around the same small group of friends, occasionally bullied, and had one close friend. It was alright, but I did move schools and I'll get onto that a little later. I was shy, but it was okay-ish even though the bullies did make me change schools anyway.

During that same time and before, whenever going out to the shops or wherever, I would always stick very close to my parents. So close that I would practically hug their leg if I was feeling shy. Well, literally: there have been several times where I have stuck exceptionally close to my parents. At extended family gatherings I would feel shy there and either stay close to my close family or try and quiet spot to retreat to if I was feeling tired or anxious

And enter my second primary school: I would only be here for 4 years, but one fact that became very clear to me at the time of joining was that I knew no one and I'm awful at settling into places. Given current evidence, it takes me about 3-4 years to properly settle into a new social environment like school. Anyway, school was pretty bad for the first year: Wanting to go home and back to my old familiar school. The change had me always anxious, and it didn't help that the school was structured very differently to my previous one, and I had a teacher that I didn't particularly like.

However, at this school I did join the karate club. I didn't really talk much, but the instructor did seem to like me and I liked him. I was relatively good at the sport and managed pretty well doing that, sometimes even when having to perform things.

Fast forward to just before I'm going to leave the school, and I've made one close friend near the last year, I was okay with the rest of them and it seemed fine. I do remember a particular moment where the teacher was talking about ego, and most of the class commented that I had the smallest one out of the lot of them, which made me incredibly shy. Anyway, with some fairly unfun moments, I manage to pass an entrance exam to a good school in my area and proceed to there. Just after this point, I've stopped doing karate and reach a decent level in it.

Oh, did I say I was moving school? Did I mention that 3/4 year settling period? Being uprooted and put somewhere else was a pretty poor experience for me. I was in a class of boys (since it was a boys school) who were relatively smart and had a higher nerd ratio due to the entrance exam but I found it difficult to get settled in again. I found talking to people to try and befriend them difficult and anxiety inducing, thus leading me preferring to read or do homework in a corner somewhere, or even just walk around the school a lot, a habit that hasn't left me yet.

One of the worse things was not having homework and waiting for what the teacher would say. People seemed to manage this much better than I did, but I found the experience of just being told off absolutely terrifying. It did make me behave very well in all of my classes, so I guess yay for SA? Its also made me pretty cautious in general and has actually saved me a few times from some unfavourable experiences (like being very cautious online and only going to sites I knew) so that was nice.

Anyway, back to first year of secondary school. The head of year noticed that I wasn't making (m)any friends, and seemed to notice my quietness. This eventually led to him recommending I get assessed for Asperger's Syndrome as I seem to fit the surface criteria for it, but after the assessment it is deemed that I do not have it, although I do show a few traits of it. Since it was established that I didn't actually have anything wrong with me, they then started to try and find me friends, and "buddy up" someone with me.

Whilst the person(s) (I forget if they do this with several people) they suggested did talk to me and stuff, I didn't really feel like I was making any friends. However, the process of being asked "Hey son, did you play with your friends today?" or "Who did you eat with today" or "What are your friends up to?" and responding with "I don't really talk with anyone" only ended up with my parents saying I had to make friends and all, I simply decided to talk with these people even though I didn't really feel a connection to them just to avoid the anxiety of my parents not being happy with me. Being an introvert, I prefer to have primarily meaningful and deeper friendships with fewer people, and I personally prefer to only have conversation when its really interesting to meaningful but that meant having to watch people to see how they engage before spending the energy to talk with them. Therefore, I decided to play along, these people who I talked to were not really friends, I call them "Friends for convenience": People who I talked to simply to appear to have friends to appear more normal and to satisfy people around me.

And, this tactic worked: My family were much more comfortable knowing I had "friends" and teachers believed that I was behaving more like a normal kid, meaning I could go about my daily life a little more normally. Furthermore, the interactions required to keep these friends for convenience were very superficial and something that didn't really make me anxious or require much energy making this a win-win situation for me.

Now, whilst this was happening I made some closer friends the year after and had a smaller group in about the 4th year (3/4 year settling in period, I'm not joking). I do keep in contact with one of them, and I feel comfortable talking with him about many things now. I've re-continued karate, and still do it today, reaching a high belt. However, there's still several things that cause me anxiety which I'll quickly list off: Texting (in certain contexts), phone calls, emails, shopping (certain contexts), certain classes, and the worst of all: presentations.

I'm sure people with SA can relate with the first 4, so I won't delve into that right now. the 5th point is more generic, but its context makes more sense if I explain it: Say youre in a class, and you do something, like drop your pen, say something, move in an awkward way or maybe even its nothing. Then, you hear something behind you: A quick whisper, maybe with your name, and then a shared laugh, followed by silence. My mind in that situation just panics: What were they talking about? Me? Was it that thing I did before? Is there something on me making me look dumb? Was it something I've just said? This is one of the worst things that I've had happen, and the logical side of me knows that it isn't me, yet I still feel anxious anyway. Another thing that make me anxious is talking to someone, and the time after that. Did I do well there? I bet they think I'm dumb. Why did I say that? They're not mentioning anything about me being nervous because they're just being polite for me, they're probably telling someone else about all this.

And do you know what makes those questions worse? Group presentation. During my 6th year at this school (I'm about 16/17 at this point) we had to deliver a group presentation on a topic in a subject area. We could choose our groups, and I managed to be with a friend that I talked to quite a lot, and another person who I was fine with. However, come the day before the presentation and I'm nervous. On the day my stomach hurts, I feel nauseous and light headed. I know, 100% that this just my anxiety, so I press on to school, press on to the presentation. My group gets called up. I'm standing at the front, waiting for the last part which is when I will speak and I'm feeling nervous. My body language is extremely closed and as much as I try to open up I just can't. It gets to my turn and the heat really turns up: All the time before I've been sweaty and my hands are practically in shock (cold and clammy) and they're shaking which is made super obvious by the paper I'm holding with my script. As I'm reading the script, I for some strange reason think certain parts seem a bit lengthy and unnecessary so I skip them entirely. Once the whole thing is over, I'm relieved to an extent: I sit down, take a breath but those questions from before are back with a vengeance: They must have noticed you shaking up there, you looked like an idiot I think to myself along with too many other things.

So, with that done, I'll mention how I've personally been managed my SA. Firstly, I plan my conversations: I have a starter, have a goal and an exit statement, along with a bunch of potential conversation points ready to go if it feels like the thing is stalling out. Then, when in the conversation I pretend to be confident. My logic "If I pretend to be confident, I'll look more confident thus lowering the amount of judgement". Also, by putting up this facade I'm not being judged, just something I'm pretending to be doing. I also think about who I'm talking to: I find that people who I have a very predefined and unchanging relationship with are much easier to talk to. For example: People that I'm just meeting at uni for the first time I won't consider them friends: There's lots of them on the course, they won't remember me and who cares if they judge me? I'm not trying to be their friend from the outset, which lowers my worry about coming off as dumb to a potential friend. Finally, I always keep my "guard" up: Being ready to say "morning" to people as they walk by, having a response to the "you're quiet" statement of conversation death "eh, I just prefer to listen and keep to myself really" etc.

Oh, and one more thing: I try to work out the long-term anxiety of something. For example, say if I had to cancel meeting up with someone. saying that you have to cancel is a fairly anxiety-inducing thing to do, but consider the fact that if you don't say in advance that you didn't then the next time you see them they want to know why you didn't go and why you didn't tell them, and judge you for that. Furthermore, people saying that you just ghost on meeting up with them is much worse than people saying that you cancel at the last minute. Therefore, the optimal action to take is to bite the lesser anxiety inducing thing and just cancel the meet-up

As you can tell, I've talked at length about some of my life and how I deal with certain situations. There's things I still want to be able to do and get better with this, such as dealing with phone calls and emails (avoiding death by 1000 re-drafts) but I've been managing to deal with this fairly well. I'd appreciate any comments on the ways that I deal with my anxiety, and if any of you relate to things in my story, particularly the "friends for convenience" part. Sorry for the long post, and if you did, thank you for reading through the whole thing!

Thanks,

Orange.