How I Broke Free From Social Anxiety
And how you can as well
I grew up with parents who valued other people’s opinions a lot. We lived in a small village where everybody knew everyone, and people’s hobbies were gossiping and scrutinizing each other.
Growing up, I received constant comments on my physical appearance, weight, grades, behavior… Almost anything that was related to me was commented on.
I didn’t fit the “standard of beauty” and I was always compared to other kids my age. I used to receive comments like, “Look at X; she’s so pretty; why don’t you do your hair like hers?” or “Y lost a lot of weight and looks wonderful; you should also go on a diet.”
Like any reasonable human being, these comments made me very uncomfortable and sad, to say the least.
For me, every encounter with people was a chance to feel worse about myself, and naturally, I didn’t want that. I wanted to stay in my room and read. I wanted to sink into different worlds where I could just be the bystander, read about other people that are not me and that don’t know me, and experience their experiences.
I had zero motivation to have experiences of my own because whenever they involved people, they mostly weren’t pleasant.
The older I got, the lonelier I became. The more anxious I became about meeting people.
Here are some examples of how my social anxiety manifested, just to give you an illustration of what it looks like.
I used to turn a deep shade of red in most social situations, even with people that I knew or related to. Sometimes I used to even turn red in anticipation of an encounter because I knew from past experience that that person would have something to say in regards to me.
I used to stutter. This occurred when I was in primary school, and luckily, it wasn’t as bad as the turning red thing. It used to happen when the teachers would choose me to read a paragraph from a textbook in front of the class. I used to get stuck on the first word and couldn’t get through it without stuttering for a couple of seconds.
My hair used to be very long, and I used to use it as a curtain to hide my face. I never, ever wore it up, and I used to constantly play with it when I was talking to people, just to have something else to focus on.
I didn’t want to get out of the house because I was sure that as soon as I stepped out of the door, people would judge me and talk about me.
Whenever I would go somewhere, I used to look around to see if someone was noticing me instead of focusing on the person that I was with or paying attention to the thing that I was doing.
I used to constantly check what other people were looking at when they were looking at me. Noticing if they are looking at my thighs, belly, or hair, fidgeting to draw their attention away from me.
I never wanted to participate in conversation with multiple people because I didn’t want multiple eyes on me at the same time when it was my turn to speak.
I used to speak super fast so that my turn to speak would be over and people would shift their focus to something else or just talk themselves.
And these are just to name a few.
When did things start to improve?
I’m going to be honest with you and say that it took a LONG time and A LOT of work for me to get over some of these things. It definitely didn’t happen overnight, and I had to face countless feelings of being uncomfortable and cringy on my journey to get rid of them.
And even then, turning red is something that is still with me; it still happens sometimes when I’m not comfortable or overtly excited, rarely, but happens. But hey, we will forever be a work in progress, right?
Things started to improve when I left my hometown and went off to university, which was in a big city. For the first time in my life, I met people who didn’t know me, had no perception of who I was, or associated me with my family. I was free to make the impression that I wanted to make, and let me tell you, that felt good!
I was forced to go to classes, and so I met people on a daily basis.
I also had to work my way through university, and I had countless customer service jobs, so I had to talk to people and socialize with colleagues.
For the first time in a long time, I had to handle people in all their moods and handle myself with people.
Now, you have probably noticed that I use the words “forced” and “had to”, which are key elements here, because if I didn’t get pushed to do these things, I would have probably stayed in my bubble and my social anxiety would have probably never improved, or I would still be in the process of battling it.
Because it’s definitely not easy doing these things when you have social anxiety, and honestly, looking back, I’d do my university experience a bit differently because I didn’t really socialize as much as I would have now. I went from classes to work to home, and said a lot of “no” to people’s invitations to hang out. It wasn’t just because I wanted to focus on studying, but because I still had a lot of mileage to cover in my social anxiety recovery journey.
Nevertheless, I’m forever grateful for that time, because it was the first step in creating the confident person that I am today.
Tips that can help you on your journey
Unfortunately, I can’t give you a step-by-step guide on how to actually recover from social anxiety, but I can tell you some things that personally worked for me and helped me along the way.
First of all, know that people don’t care about you as much as you think. Not in a bad way, but people care only about themselves and how the world perceives them. If you are having a bad hair day and don’t want to get out of the house because you think that people are going to notice, don’t sweat it, no one cares, everyone is preoccupied with how their own hair looks and how the world perceives them.
And you know what? Say that they do notice. So what if they judge you? In those situations, I think, “Wow, does this person have nothing interesting going on in their life or anything else to focus on besides my appearance?”
Who’s to say that people’s opinions are right? Let them judge. People will always judge you, no matter what you do. They do it because of them and their internal space, it has nothing to do with you. So just go ahead and do whatever it is that you want to do.
You are not going to be young forever. This is something that I always tell myself when I want to do something and I’m afraid of how I’m going to look. I say: “When you are 60, do you want to look back at yourself and think: “Oh, I wish that I did that thing and didn’t care about what other people thought”? or “Wow, I was such a cool person that lived freely, I have all these memories now because I wasn’t afraid to do things”?”.
If you don’t change, your life will not change either. I’m sure that you have dreams and goals that you want to achieve. If the way that you are behaving right now is not serving the path that you need to take in order to achieve them, how are you going to get there? You need to change and take different actions. That’s the only way that you are going to get what you want in life.
Know that for the most part, people don’t have bad intentions. Hear me out here. Looking back now, I know that even the people who said what I perceived as horrible things to me when I was young, didn’t do it to be assholes. Again, I’ll say most of them because there are some people who are just mean, and that’s on them. But usually, people behave in ways that correspond with how they were brought up, and they think that it’s appropriate.
Usually, people don’t question things, rather, they go with the approach of “this is how it is and this is how it’s going to be” without stopping to think if it’s benefiting them or to consider how they are making other people feel when they behave in a certain way or say certain things. For me, realizing that people aren’t actually mean or have bad intentions made me a bit more inclined to meet them since I was less “scared” of them.
I truly believe that when people say something to you that might seem hurtful, it’s mostly about them and not about you. It’s their belief and their understanding of something, and it doesn’t apply to you.
Again, just because someone says something to you doesn’t mean that it’s true or that you should accept it as a fact.
I hope that this article gave you value, and I hope that you are kicking your social anxiety’s you-know-what. You deserve it. You deserve to have awesome memories from your life, don’t let it stop you!
Here’s a free guide that I have created for anyone who’s struggling with social anxiety.
https://annabelles-letters.ck.page/e6905512eb
