Sometimes — pretty often, to be honest — I wonder how much of my current situation is caused by actual depression and how much by my innate introversion taken to the extreme.
I’m the living proof that introversion or extroversion are something you’re born with. My parents, to this day, still complain that when I was a baby and someone came visit, I’d scream like a police siren. I guess I never felt at ease around people, and that never really changed.
I mean, it’s not like I hate people. I’m not a psychopath. I just don’t feel the need to be around people most of the time, as I’m perfectly at ease with my own company. That may make me sound conceited and arrogant, but I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is that while some people get bored on their own, I’m just the opposite: I always have something to do, and more often than not, other people kind of get in the way.
This is not to say that I don’t occasionally wish I had people around me. Sometimes I do, and that’s when years of having virtually no social training backfire: I’ve made most of my friends online, and the geographically closest ones are still far enough that it’s not the easiest thing to get together anyway. You may wonder: why online? are you that scared of human contact? No, not really. It’s just that I live in a small town in the middle of somewhere in Europe, and I have peculiar interests — I’ve always been a geek — that virtually nobody around here shares. I will admit however that for me it’s easier to make friends online: I’m overly conscious of how I look, how I speak, how I move, and when I meet someone in person my paranoia switches to overdrive. It’s part of why I seldom go out. It’s easier for me to be myself when I know I’m not being judged by how I look or talk, but only by how I say. I’ve always believed that it’s what’s inside someone that matters, not their outer shell.
Of course, all of this is inextricably related. Sometimes I feel lonely and I have nobody to hang out with; and even if I do, I end up being uncomfortable as it’s not something I’m used to, which usually prevents me from really enjoying it; and I come full circle by wondering why the hell I even bothered in the first place, vowing that I’m done with this “meeting people” business for the time being. All introverts need time to decompress after being social, but I’m one of those lucky ones who need some extra time on top of that just to deal with all the anxiety that came with it.
The funny thing here is that my social anxiety is the quiet kind, as I call it. Well, it’s not funny at all, really. It’s actually the sneakiest kind of anxiety. Ask an anxious person what anxiety feels like, and you usually get the typical description of sweaty palms, increased heart rate, dry mouth, and so on and so forth. I’m not like that. My social anxiety takes place on a subconscious level, like having a kettle that’s boiling inside of me, whose vibrations I can feel but that’s just very slightly out of reach so I can’t shut it down. It’s really annoying, because I am perfectly able to tell myself that it makes no sense: why am I even nervous at all about going for a walk with Alice (or Bob, it’s really not a matter of gender) if we chat online so much? I can see myself from the outside, and I know that all that nervousness is my ancestral fight-or-flight response being triggered by something that’s objectively not dangerous at all, yet I can’t stop it. I can tell myself that it’s pointless but it won’t help, and so there’s a side of me that’s just nervous and anxious, and another side of me going “why must I be like this when I know better?”, and I end up getting annoyed at myself because of it, in a self-fulfilling prophecy that very often leads me to call myself stupid. That is pretty much the worst thing I can do, because all of this comes with enough self-loathing as it is. But I am fully aware that my social anxiety pointless and I can rationally see it, yet I really just can’t control it, no matter how I try.
At this point I’m sure that whoever’s reading this belongs to either one of two kinds of people. There’s those who are nodding and saying “I know exactly how this guy feels” and maybe are even relieved that they’re not the only ones going through these things. And then there’s those who never went through depression, social anxiety, who are not introverts yet not necessarily extroverts but just somewhere in between, and have no idea what I’m talking about at all. Those are usually either confused by all that I just wrote about, or maybe think that I am making this up, as a weird way of looking for attention. I will address this in detail in a future post, but for now let me just say that I don’t really blame them, even though it would be nice if they at least made an effort to understand.
The problem is that they expect to apply their own frame of reference to others, even though it simply cannot be done: it’s as if they were surprised that a color blind person can’t tell red from green; it seems to impossible to them that others may have such a condition, simply because they are free from it. Just like color blindness, depression and anxiety are conditions that can’t be detected from the outside. That’s what makes it so difficult to deal with them. That’s why there’s such a stigma that comes with it. That’s why some people think that those of us who are fighting this daily struggle, those of us who are locked in this prison, are just making it up. There are only two words for those who think we are faking it; two simple, short words: I wish.