Low self esteem and social anxiety

Hi there 🖐️

i am starting to realize that I suffer from very low self esteem and bad social anxiety. It has been like this my entire life. As a child I even had selective mutism… then it got reinforced with bullying and quite traumatic experiences.

Now I suffer from loneliness, inability to feel close to anyone. I feel bad every time I’m around people, and I feel weird and find excuses to avoid social gatherings… I even panic to meet my amazing friends, thinking that I will be unable to offer them good company… I am putting myself aside, and keeping me from achieving a lot of things in life… it’s becoming hard to live, my relationship with my boyfriend is *** partly for these reasons and he is starting to lose patience and go enjoy with other people.

my dad has social anxiety as well and doesn’t have any friends. It’s just his wife, kids when we visit and his job. I don’t want to end up the same way but I watch it coming, hopelessly.

So I started therapy. I got diagnosed with quite severe depression. My therapist advised me to take medication and that it will get better, but to be honest I felt this way for the longest time, and I don’t believe that i could get over all these “existential problems” one day. And I don’t want to spend my life on medication to have the illusion that life is good. Until now it feels like I was wired the wrong way.

anyways, these topics are not very popular generally and I never heard someone that got over it.

I would love to have some testimonies on people that went from low self esteem, severe depression and social anxiety to achieving great things, enjoying life and feeling enough. Just to have proof that it can be this way also :’)

thank you for reading,

take care 🫶🏽🌱