Everybody feels like that sometimes…

Talking about personal mental health issues is rarely a pleasant thing to do. Whether you talk about depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, or any other non-visible condition, you'll inevitably run into comments telling you it's not unusual, and "everyboy feels that way from time to time". Bonus points if they give well-meaning but unhelpful advice. Extra bonus points if they give condescending unhelpful advice. "Have you tried not feeling that way?" At which point I guess I'm supposed to slap my forehead and wonder aloud why I had never thought of that.

Me: "I feel super anxious when I'm in simple social situations."

Them: "That's normal! Everybody feels like that sometimes."

Me: "Wow! I had no idea! Everybody has to psych themselves up to make every mundane phone call and then fail to make the call 80% of the time anyway? I thought I was the only one! Everybody else's heart pounds if they try to tell a three-sentence joke to anyone… including their own family members? What a relief! Everyone has bailed out of a fast food drive-thru because they're not mentally-prepared enough for talking to a human? Whew!"

Ahem.

For years I thought my main condition was depression. A description of typical depression symptoms matched up with how I had experienced life, and "depression" was something that ran in my family. My mother had struggled for years, in her own way, and I could see the signs in other family members, so it seemed a slam dunk diagnosis.

Then years and years ago I started reading blogs (many on Tumblr) written by people with amazingly similar experiences to mine. I started noticing they consistently talked about anxiety. I hadn't really considered "anxiety" as a thing I could have: My (now ex-)wife had capital-A capital-I Anxiety Issues including devastating panic attacks with physical effects like severe nausea. My symptoms didn't match that at all. But these accounts were descriptions of a more generalized anxiety, and most dealt with "social anxiety", and when I began thinking about my life and experiences through the lens of those accounts, everything about me made much more sense.

Re-evaluating my life through that lens was a bit like how the last few minutes of The Sixth Sense causes you to re-interpret the rest of the movie. Suddenly all those weird reactions I had to "normal things" made sense. My pressing need to get out of crowded places or inability to enjoy myself in friendly situations where attention was focused on me wasn't so strange anymore. I was experiencing anxiety the whole time! If you prefer the Fight Club twist: The depression and anxiety were the same thing all along!

It was my "What the fuck is water?" moment: I had been swimming in it my whole adult life, so I thought it was just life and didn't know it had a name.

Is that enough analogies?

I've always felt "uncomfortable" in most social settings, and had avoided as many as I could, but I had always chalked it up to "being shy" or "just not feeling up to it" because of depression. Granted, "depression" was a label that fit (and still does), but "being tremendously anxious all the time because of a social anxiety disorder" is a much better description of my experience. It's not that depression wasn't part of it, it was that the anxiety fed the depression, and to some extent, vice versa.

Pretty much every social interaction I've ever had has been colored by it. Every once in a while I'll mesh well enough with someone so that I don't feel this way with them, for a while anyway, but it's a very small, exclusive, and transient list, and it only applies when there's very few other people around in any case.

This isn't to say I don't try: I do like my small friend groups. The most "comfortable" I've been was when I was a stay-at-home dad and I was hanging out with homeschool moms. I've always been more comfortable with women anyway, and we all shared a similar lifestyle and we could talk about kids, spouses, our plans, etc. I wasn't perfectly at ease, of course, and more often than not I'd still have to put up with hours of residual fragments of the things I had said in those conversations forcefully stuck in a loop in my head along with a feeling of growing dread, but.. I still tried because it wasn't every time.

Anyhoo, while it might be true that "everybody feels awkward sometimes", maybe it's not really the same thing? Maybe "I have avoided playing board games since early adulthood because I can't stand being the center of attention for even a few minutes while it is my turn" is a little more than "I feel awkward occasionally"? Maybe "I try to walk on the right-hand sidewalk so I'll be walking with traffic because I feel too anxious with all the drivers looking at my face" is not exactly… a "normal" thing?