// People Without Anxiety Don’t Understand Anxiety. //

bad-mojo:

bluepineappleplate:

I’ve had this horrible message I received on facebook, saying horrible things about someone I care a lot about, floating around in my head for the past week or so.

Apparently, there’s this notion that having relationships, having a job, speaking at rallies, goofing around with friends, and sometimes even just having friends completely nullifies any statement of having social anxiety.

  • The ability to have a partner (or even multiple partners) doesn’t mean a person doesn’t have social anxiety. Just because I am in a relationship doesn’t mean that I don’t find myself fighting every so often to try and maintain control of how I react to the relationship from time to time. It just means that I do have to work extra hard if I want it to work.
  • The ability to have a job doesn’t mean that a person isn’t pushing as hard as they can to hold it up. It doesn’t mean that they won’t go home at the end of the day and fall into that slumped desire to be perfectly alone because their social experiences of the day- being exposed to so many different people- haven’t exhausted them. Then again, some people with social anxiety are perfectly fine dealing with people at work. Sometimes, you can put on a mask and deal with the day, and it feels better. 
  • Participating in / speaking at rallies doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have social anxiety. I don’t intend to speak towards anyone else’s experience but my own on this one, but, sometimes, when you feel strongly enough about something, you feel that you have to be a part of it. And sometimes (as happened to me when I participated in Slutwalk Seattle), being around enough other people who feel just as strongly about it as you do make you feel strong enough to yell and scream and maybe even just talk, but to really be a part of the moment. 
  • Goofing around with friends- even in public- doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have social anxiety. In my experience, if I can have a strong enough relationship with someone, I tend to feel better when I’m with that person. In high school, I could go around the mall and be a regular, obnoxious teenager just like anyone else, because I wasn’t alone- I was with people who made me feel more comfortable. 

None of these invalidate anyone’s social anxiety. I’m seriously so disgusted at these assumptions (especially because they were brought up to me by someone I’d thought of as a friend, as they attempted to invalidate someone I care about by using the exact same kinds of things that I’ve experienced as a reason that she was a liar).

Last week, I mentioned in passing to my study group in class that I have horrible social anxiety. Both of them were astonished- which is understandable. I’m not sure where people get this idea that everyone with social anxiety just sits in a ball in the corner of a room. I can talk in class just fine. I can present (a bit shaky-handed, but no harm otherwise). I can, more-or-less, deal in group situations. But these things don’t change the fact that, often after a long day, I find myself curling up in my closet trying to find some alone time, or going over and over and over and over and over everything I said for the next day or two. I can make phone calls, but that doesn’t change the fact that it often takes me upwards of ten minutes to work myself up to the point that I can use the phone.

Just because a person’s social anxiety doesn’t manifest itself the way you want it to does not invalidate their identity. Don’t be such an ableist shit.

This. So much.

And this goes for EVERY kind of anxiety, not just the social kind.
You NEVER know what is going on behind the surface of a person, and I am so sick of being constantly stigmatized, doubted, (“but you don’t seem anxious”), and the all-time favorite “why don’t you just GET YOURSELF OUT THERE?” which I sometimes hear from fellow sufferers of social anxiety sometimes but here’s a newsflash for you: we all take different time to recover and just because you did doesn’t make you entitled to act like a haughty piece of shit so stop acting like you’re better just because you managed to work through a specific fear.

When being in the grocery store or making a phonecall without a full-blown panic attack is seen as a fucking victory, don’t you DARE invalidate the shit I deal with just because it’s an invisible disorder and tell me to just “get over myself”.

EVERYTHING makes me worry and have anxiety to the point of sending myself into panic attacks and sheer terror on bad periods/bad days. But guess what - there is no cutting slack for you because life isn’t about getting pampered.

If you have a phobia of snakes, your life might limited to the point where you cannot walk barefoot in the grass. Touching a snake though, makes you feel this sheer animalistic terror and your whole body just screams “run the hell out there”.

Now imagine this snake is EVERYTHING. This is what my life is like. So I don’t want to hear anything of this “but just do X, it’ll make you feel better”.
Therapy exists for a reason, you’re just a cretin on the internet.