Here's what it feels like to live with my particular brand of social anxiety.
Sometimes my anxiety is a lumbering beast that wants me to stay in bed so that I don't have to trudge through another day of pallid existence. Sometimes it is an unsolicited hummingbird in my heart that has made a deal with my breath to only travel on Track 1, where no deep breathing or meditation can fix it. Sometimes it is a swirling of the world as I lie alone in bed at night, ribbons in my stomach swimming in great currents against the tide of sleep.
This is what it boils down to: the fear that I am unloved and completely alone in the world. That I was born this way and will die this way - unknown, undiscovered, uncared for. An urge to split a channel down from my sternum to my stomach with a blade till I see blood and discover that oh, my existence never really mattered anyway. A life of hearts drawn on the windshield, and for what, for something peripheral that never made a dent in anyone else's life anywhere.
In my mind, I will always need to make other people comfortable and feel hurt when that is not reciprocated. Why would it be reciprocated? Few people are at the same time as warm and gracious and loving and kind, and also as intelligent, funny and charming as the family I grew up in. I have drifted out of worlds with people like this - or I did not value them enough in the past to know how rare a thing it was. Either way, here I am, forever feeling like I am stuck on an island with no one else on it. Floating Alaska, party of one.
Being left out, being talked about when I am not there, being taken advantage of and then discarded. Not having control over how I present my image and carry it forth. Living only in the minds of people and their unique parochial understandings of me through the singular angles I give them to understand me. I give everyone shards and edges, only I know the entire bubble of the picture - the confidence and charm on the outside, the tact to piece together two fives and make them a twenty in almost any language. Only I know the bubbling lava I learn to live with each day on the inside too, the constant coming up short, the deadweight of the black decaying fungus log of past lives, little flowers sprouting through rotting wood.
Is it worth carrying that log around?
So this is my anxiety. This is the cold oatmeal I stand in, sticky toes, heart pacing, afraid to step into iterations of the same old situations. Colonialism everywhere, jaded and rusted. Shit in a toilet bowl. Being left alone, being left behind, being laughed at from where they think I can't see it. Being anything short of loved to the max, unconditionally. Sitting in calcium water instead of being polished to steel tip. And me avoiding it all for just a while longer.
Avoidance is supposed to be harmful, but the fact that I have control over one tiny damn thing in my life is a balm for the eternal scraping of my soul.
