Diary of a Prisoner No parole allowed

2016-01-23

Introversion and social anxiety

Filed under: Blog — Tags: , , — Inmate #840528 @ 01:11

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.

2016-01-17

About the other site that used to be here

Filed under: Blog — Inmate #840528 @ 22:35

I was recently made aware that there used to be another website at this same address, which dealt with the reality of an actual inmate in a real American prison. It seems, judging from what I gathered by searching online, that it was a very interesting site.

Unfortunately, however, this blog is in no way linked to it, and I do not know their owner; indeed, until someone pointed out to me that there was something else here, I simply had no idea. I registered this domain name in early 2015 on a whim, as I liked the name. Only recently I figured I could use it for an anonymous blog to talk freely about my own personal struggle with depression and all that’s related to it, because it does feel like a prison a lot of the time.

Anyone who comes here looking for the old site may be disappointed, and I understand that. If I could reach the previous site’s owner I would gladly do so, and I would happily add a link to their current site here if they made themselves known to me.

Update — the old blog’s admin reached out to me in a comment and said the following:

Thanks for the shout-out to the old site! I was the admin. Prisoner X will be so happy to hear so many of his readers have not forgotten him! He is still in prison, but I hear he is working with another admin to get a site back up. Check out our Facebook page to see stuff from the old site and for updates on X. It appears that everyone who was subscribed to the old blog is now subscribed to yours :). Congrats on the blog! I am very interested to hear about a different kind of a prison from your perspective.

If you find this interesting, you’re very welcome to keep reading. I am not committing to any post schedule, not I make any promise whatsoever about how long I will keep this up. I may write regularly, or I may only do so when I’m at my worst, using this blog as an outlet. I really just don’t know.

What I do know is that I hope that this blog, despite being first and foremost something I’m doing for myself, may help someone else out there deal with their own struggle. This is something that often makes us feel hopeless and alone, yet we are not. I promise.

2016-01-12

Hi, world.

Filed under: Blog — Tags: — Inmate #840528 @ 13:19

I’m just a prisoner, one of many. I’m nothing special. Many others are in the same predicament as I: prisoners of themselves.

Depression, low self-esteem, loneliness, and so on and so forth. They’re all links of the same chain, a heavy chain I’ve worn around my neck ever since I was born and that’s been weighing me down ever since. Seldom have I been able to run, let alone endeavor to fly, yet this is nobody’s fault by mine. Or is that also my low self-esteem talking? I don’t think I will ever know.

What is the point of this blog? It has no point, truly. It’s just an yet another exercise in futility to try and feel better, somehow. You know, how they always say to keep a journal? I never kept one. I have issues with the past, I can’t even go through old photos; many people love doing so, but me, well, it makes me very uneasy. Good memories sadden me because they’re gone; bad memories sadden me because they’re bad. So a journal, a private, personal journal, is more of a nightmare than anything else. But I figured: let’s give it a try, after all I have nothing to lose. Nobody know who I am. I’m just a number. These are just words. This could disappear in an instant and even if it were archived, it would be quickly lost in the ocean of more sensible content out there.

I’m just a prisoner, one of many. I’m nothing special. But I feel like talking about it.

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