More Considerate, More Anxious
As I wrote about last week, when I was younger my social anxiety may have been more obvious to others, but as I got older I started to feel worse inside.
I’m sure that another reason for this is my becoming more considerate with age.
As many teenagers are, I was self-absorbed. I didn’t really consider how others might have felt. Naturally, having social anxiety, I would usually assume people didn’t particularly like me, aside from my friends and family, who I assumed would continue to love me as long as I didn’t do anything outrageously harmful to them. I also convinced myself that if any of my friends and family did want to end our relationship I would be better off without them anyway.
I had blinders on.
Maybe this was in some ways a defence mechanism. I didn’t feel capable of handling other people’s emotions since my own felt so overwhelming, so I shielded myself from them.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-to-late twenties that I started to analyse my own role in relationships, and really try to consider how those around me might feel, either independently of, or because of, me.
This caused my social anxiety to go into overdrive. It was no longer solely focused on whether people I didn’t know well didn’t particularly like me. It started to seep into all of my close relationships too. I started to doubt whether my friends and family actually liked me.
In some ways, this was the straw that broke the camels back. I could live with thinking people I didn’t really know didn’t like me, but I couldn’t live thinking those I loved might not like me, might feel worse in my presence, might feel let down by my lack of kindness, support, empathy, whatever.
Now, at 35, I look back at my teenage shelf with some shame, at how thoughtless I often was – something else I need to work through – but also with sympathy. I didn’t have any of the knowledge or tools to do any better. Over the last decade, one of my sole focus has been on attaining that knowledge and those tools, for my own sake, but also so that I may be able to help others do better – for themselves and for those around them – before they hit their second act.
