Why compliments fill me with anxiety

750 Words — Day #22

Michael Forrest
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

Yesterday was interesting — I posted an explanation of my project on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839029) and it stayed on the front page for a few hours.

I didn’t get a single negative reaction but I still felt really stressed out all day for some reason. I’d found it difficult to finish the blog post (and I think it would probably benefit another proof-reading but I don’t want to look at it again) and I was pretty nervous about the reaction. I mean — it was a year’s work and involved a lot of risk and sacrifice — it took a real toll on me. I thought I’d talk about my anxiety today. Here are some of the comments I’m going to talk about. Honest to god I’m not trying to humblebrag here.

Hacker News comment
Twitter message
Facebook comment
Hacker News comment
YouTube comment

When I read things like this I don’t always smile. I often grimace or squirm. I mean they certainly give me a little endorphin boost but the bigger or more insightful or closer to what I wanted people to say, the more panicked I feel.

Quincy’s message made my spider senses tingle (“Is this legit? What’s the catch?”) but I investigated his publication and found a very detailed submission guide including advice on how to write well and how best to use the features of Medium. The guide even added “If you use the word ‘bananas’ in your submission we’ll know you read this”. So it was legitimate and I could allow myself to feel special for being approached.

As my phone buzzed intermittently with a drizzle of new Twitter follows, Medium recommends and YouTube subscriptions, I wasn’t excited; I felt scared. I can’t really explain why.

Is it imposter syndrome? Don’t I think I deserve this? Not really — I mean I’m pretty proud of what I’ve created and I’m grateful that a few people appreciate it.

Is it that it’s not enough? It could be. I mean, a smattering of Twitter followers won’t pay any bills any time soon. If I’m honest, I wanted a lot more from this video. I really hoped that it would propel the song to a much wider audience and that the same effect that propagated the song through SoundCloud would happen on YouTube. But does this explain my panic or anxiety? Not really.

I think I’m waiting for somebody to explain to me that what I’ve done makes me a bad person. When I feel exposed, I feel like I will be ‘found out’. But I think I’m generally a good, honest, hard-working person, so what am I so afraid of? Is it about being criticised for things I’m trying to be good at? I’ve had my share of shitty YouTube comments and trolling. I don’t think I let them get to me. I’m not really worried about some idiot’s opinion but I do worry that somebody smart, prominent and respected will take me down if I poke my head too far above the water.

When I’m feeling small, I find myself trying to make things that are as non-subjective as possible — things that are defensible in logical terms, where the viewer, listener or user doesn’t have to like me in order to like the thing I made. I prefer when I’m feeling braver and can go out on more of a limb, but this leaves me vulnerable to attack. But if something’s safe then how good can it really be? I think Shoebox is an example of something ‘safe’. It’s undeniably very clever but it doesn’t give you much of an insight into me.

I have this fear that if I affect other people I will generally do so negatively. I worry that I will inconvenience or upset people somehow. I fear that I will make people angry and they will hurt me. I can trace this back to childhood — I grew up the eldest son of a man whose first wife who had been kind to him and nurtured him, the love of his life, mother of his four children, the woman who he’d sang with, been silly with, been clever and creative with, had ultimately killed herself rather than stay with him. I had no emotional stability. I was rewarded for my academic achievements and little else. I was a lightning rod for my father’s irrational anger which would strike regularly and unfairly. I was emotionally battered and brutalised in my formative years. Children feel responsible for the actions of the adults around them because they think think they’re the centre of the universe. Rather than realise that my mother’s death was not my fault, I invented tenuous and convoluted ways in which it was my fault. I used to believe that if I let somebody know that I loved them, then they would be furious with me and might then kill themselves. I still feel now that if I make too many waves then people will get hurt.

I’m talking about feelings here, not beliefs. I know logically that nobody is going to kill themself because I tell them I love them, and they certainly wouldn’t do so just because I wrote a pop song. I know logically that if I generously give myself to others that some of them will be grateful. I just have to prove this to myself emotionally by doing it over and over again. The only way to disconnect an emotional expectation from an action is to perform that action again and again until you internalise a more realistic reaction. The problem is that even if I make a million people happy, I’ll always have that one data point from the time that I tried to make somebody happy and she did kill herself — that single black swan that proves unambiguously that not all swans are white.

Michael Forrest

Written by

Musician, App Smith, Good To Hear, Squares TV

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