Stupid and Dumb and Scared

While it’s different for everyone, anxiety can be a devastating ailment that destroys personal and social enjoyment. The subject is still sensitive for me but sometimes you must share your struggles to fully move on from them — and maybe it’ll help a few others in the process. I live with fragments of that old fear every day but my innate desire to create and share and socialize has once again started to eclipse the darkness.

Several years ago, I became acquainted with a group of people I generally considered my friends. Most of them were decent people, others were downright hilarious, and a whole bunch of them were a mixture of the two. They could be deep and shallow, meaningful and thoughtless, and I think that tends to be a good combination of a versatile person. You can talk about the hard times, but not without creating some great memories as well.

There was one, however, that I held in higher regard. They were rapidly becoming what I considered a best friend. I don’t have those anymore. It seems like an unnecessary title. I have friends I consider more intimate than others but why put that much pressure on a person?

I digress.

This person I’ll call Jack shared my interests, my sense of humor. Jack was in a lot of ways a skewed version of myself and I think that’s why we connected so well. We did a lot together. Spent a lot of time just talking and sharing our experiences.

Around that time, I was going through some life changes. Adapting to college life, meeting my girlfriend (now happily engaged), among other lesser things. And what ends up happening when this kind of change occurs is that some relationships start to be tended to less and less. It’s a normal cycle. Most people understand.

You never realize you’ve let a sociopath into your home until they catch the place on fire. You never realize that’s the case until they snap at you for trying to start a life beyond their bubble. What ensued was weeks of terror — harassment, threats, and generally malicious attacks on me and my home. Suddenly, this person who I had considered my best friend had turned into my greatest adversary. I hate to say that Jack won, at the time.

I broke down. I failed most of my classes that year. I had to go an extra year in college because of it. I became embittered and volatile. People had done mean things before. You don’t go through twelve years of primary school without running into cruel people. But this was an assault on my family, my security, and my well being. I still can’t bring myself to go into it in deep detail.

I kept the pain internalized. For years I struggled with crippling anxiety and depression, alone. I lost sleep. I lost motivation. I should have opened up to the people I care about and saw a therapist, but I was stubborn and dumb and scared.

The last thing I want to do is reaffirm other stubborn and scared people out there that the right thing to do is avoid professional help. I’ll tell you right now that, today, my anxiety has receded and the depression ebbs and flows but it took me nearly five years to get to this point. Recovery began three years ago when I started working on my first book in earnest.

I know that, if I had been in better condition at the time, it would not have taken me this long to finish the story. Back then, I had a constant inner critic shouting at me about how terrible my writing was. It was too loud to disagree with. Today, it’s only a whisper and sometimes doesn’t speak at all.

I’ve moved, in more ways than one, since those days. Things don’t bother me as they once did. People don’t scare me. I’m much more cautious and calm when it comes to potential new friends. If any good came from all of it, it was a hard-earned lesson in how not to trust a person and how to protect yourself.

Writing this has sparked new waves of anxiety. What if Jack sees this? What if some random person I’ve never even met sees it and assumes it’s about them? That I’m the one they terrorized when they were younger? Are they still like that? Are they different now and regret what they did? Those are all questions I wonder about the teen — now an adult — who once tore me apart.

There was a time when I had wished Jack dead. In my darkest, most empty of days, I had hoped that word would find its way that he had perished. Now, so many years later, I only hope that he has changed and that he’s are okay; that he got help for the clearly crippling social issues he faced; that he’s not stupid and dumb and scared.

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Have you had similar issues? Am I insane for feeling the way I do today? Let me know.