Oct 6 • General Chat
How I Feel After Escaping The Mental Prison Of Social Anxiety
It’s hard to describe the kind of freedom you feel where every person feels approachable.
When you can talk to anyone without your chest tightening.
That feeling alone changed how I experience the entire world.
But I wasn’t always like this.
For the longest time, I had severe social anxiety.
My father urged me to go and talk to the cashiers & shop clerks…
But that was equivalent to swallowing poison to me.
Whenever I was greeted with the thought of speaking to a stranger.
I got that suffocating feeling in my chest.
Even in a spacious room, I felt constricted.
I felt physically sick, and my body even warmed up.
Even with a room full of people, I couldn’t enjoy myself.
My thoughts consumed me, and my fight-or-flight mode activated each time I found myself in such scenarios.
“Gosh, I wanna get back home.”
And each time I was out with people, I wanted to rush back home.
Thinking that I’d crush it the next time, since it’ll be a fresh start.
But that was a lie. Because the cycle only repeated. And it repeated for years…
The worst part about it was that I saw every interaction as a “performance.”
“Oh, I didn’t perform good yesterday.” I said to myself often after meeting people.
Since I thought of it in a performance frame, I felt so much pressure to perform well.
And I had “performance anxiety” the entire time.
Watching YouTube videos on improving my social interactions made the situation even worse.
I often found my thoughts going against me, depending on the videos I’d watched.
“Sit up straight!”
“Your body language isn’t correct!”
“You’re smiling too much, that’ll come across as weak!”
“You’re losing eye contact, it should be 3-4 sec long!”
“You’re nodding too much!”
It was a disaster…
It almost felt like it would continue for the rest of my life.
And I couldn’t even think what that life would be like if I continued living underneath this burden.
Apart from that, there was this regret that I had each night going to sleep after a “failed” interaction.
“I SHOULD’VE SHARED MY OPINON INSTEAD OF SMILING ALONG LIKE AN IDIOT.”
This misery of not speaking my mind left me hopeless.
I thought that the world might never know the real me. They’d never know my:
My preferences when it comes to cars, my taste in music, and my opinions about business.
My random dark jokes, my extremely weird analogies, my specific preference in women.
My old-man-like philosophies, my weird way of thinking about life, my thoughts on religion.
“People would never know all of these things about me. Is that the life I wanna live?”
“Where only I know myself and nobody else does. Is that the life I wanna live?”
“I’m only a walking human being who doesn’t show any of his personality. Even animals show their personality in their own ways. Is that the life I wanna live?”
That was enough for me to change. To change for the better.
And so I did. After years of being lost..I finally changed.
And now it feels like the world has been unlocked to me.
Every person on the street is now interactable.
I don’t usually have that sharp pain in my chest before going to talk, even to my family members.
And no, I won’t claim to be a superhuman who’s mastered it completely.
There are still days I feel off and feel like I’ve only mastered 80% of it.
But that 80% feels almost like a superpower, especially when I see people around me who struggle with it.
I am grateful every day because of how relieving it is to live like this.
If I were to describe that feeling, I’d say:
It’s just as refreshing as drinking that glass of water in the middle of the night when you’re as thirsty as a camel.
It’s just as enjoyable as taking your upper body out from the sunroof to enjoy the wind on the windy road.
It is just as liberating as a judge telling you your prison sentence is over and you can finally go to your home.
Apart from these weird analogies, I can’t describe how relieving that feeling actually is.
I wish everyone reading this gets to experience that feeling.
That priceless feeling.
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How I Feel After Escaping The Mental Prison Of Social Anxiety
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