I have always been an anxious person but in childhood, my worries then centred more on my safety than social situations. I enjoyed talking to people and didn’t really think about how they perceived me. No one who knew me would have considered me socially anxious. This began to change as I got older and like many teenagers, my awareness of the perceptions of others became overpowering. My mental health deteriorated sharply and I became depressed and anxious. It started out by distancing myself from others, eating lunch in the toilets, avoiding meetups because they made me too nauseous. By year 13, I had stopped attending school and was receiving CBT through CAMHS. While therapy and medication helped ease the depression, the social anxiety has been much harder to overcome.
When I’m talking to new people, it usually plays out like this: heat rises to my face, my hands tingle, and I feel myself separating from my body, like I’m watching my life play out from a distance. I forget how to form words – my head is completely empty and all that is left is an unbearable feeling that I am in danger. In more intense situations, like talking in class, this can spiral into a panic attack, where I cry and hyperventilate and then feel completely drained for the next few days.
After social situations, I am often left with the sense that I’ve done something awful. Most of the time, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what exactly it is but nonetheless I can’t shake an all-consuming feeling of shame. I keep thinking that there’s something fundamentally flawed in me and that I’ll never succeed in a world where everything requires social skills that I can barely manage.
These feelings have led to me avoiding social situations. When I push myself to engage, I expect that nobody would want to get to know me so I’m quiet and reserved. Throughout my undergraduate years, I didn’t make a single friend and would spend almost every day alone in my room. The fact that I hadn’t made any friends reinforced my belief that I was incapable of it and my isolation and anxiety worsened further.
It took me a long time to recognise that my social anxiety stems from a deep-seated sense of inferiority. Even now, I struggle to talk about this because I’m terrified that others will think, ‘You don’t just think that you’re inferior – you really are’. This fear has made it difficult to seek treatment as it can feel like my anxiety is a reflection of my inadequacy, rather than something that can be addressed.
My perspective began to shift after a conversation with a friend. I was explaining that I couldn’t join her in meeting new people, citing my poor social skills and the belief that it takes a long time for people to warm up to me. My friend, who is not the type of person to give false reassurance, said that she’d never thought this about me. She added, “You forget that you’re a person too. You really undersell yourself”. I was overcome with emotion because for the first time, I considered the possibility that my belief that I’m a social failure might not be true and that maybe I wasn’t lesser, but a person like everyone else.
Since that conversation, I’ve felt more able to challenge my belief that there is something fixed in me that means I can’t talk to people. I’ve been reading more about social anxiety through my neuroscience master’s and my work with this charity. This has helped me to identify my thoughts as symptoms rather than based in reality, though it is still difficult to fully believe at times. I’ve also been trying to push myself to engage in different social situations, and, while they’re still challenging, it’s slowly getting easier.
