Tag: anxiety

A difference between my social anxiety and other people’s social anxiety

I get the impression that other people have their feelings of  social exclusion/ unwantedness/ “no one likes me and that makes me a bad person”/ etc. triggered by comparing themselves to other people around them or to a mental standard they have for things like the Normal Amount of time to spend with friends, etc.

It doesn’t work like that for me, because most of the time, on a basic level, I don’t expect to be the same as other people. I don’t see other people doing things and assume that I’m supposed to be/I deserve to be doing them too. I can feel envious or lonely when I see other people having fun, because I do want to be doing what they’re doing, but I don’t have the aspect of… frustration? that I see in a lot of other people. The “Come on, I should already have that, why don’t I?” feeling.

Sometimes, that lack of comparison is really bad, but in this situation, it’s kind of a positive thing. It means that if I make one new friend, I don’t feel bad because I “should” have ten new friends. I can value my little baby steps of social interaction as positive things for me, without judging myself by an outside standard.

I can get very self-hating about specific situations where I messed up socially, but I don’t do that about my overall situation, at least.

Stuff I did to deal with anxiety, part 2

I found that unless I made a conscious effort to find things to feel relieved about, every bad thing I had worried about that didn’t happen would slip past me unnoticed, while I went straight on to worrying about the next thing. I did two things related to this:

I thought back to things that I had been worried about some time before, and reminded myself that if they hadn’t happened by now, they weren’t going to, and this meant that whatever risky thing I’d done had actually been safe. This was good on an immediate level because it made it easier to feel physically relaxed and less anxious, when I had a specific thing to be glad about. It also, eventually, let me build up the idea that certain things weren’t actually risky, because I kept doing them and they kept turning out okay.

I also decided on specific time limits on some specific things I was anxious about. “[Bad thing] would happen within [time] from [risky thing], so if that much time passes and it hasn’t happened, I can stop worrying.”

Today I actually explained out loud to Sparkly how I ended up emetophobic. Ey asked me to try to explain why it would scare me, beyond that it’s physically unpleasant.

It was hard to talk about, still, at this late date. I’m glad I did, though.

I really just need a copy of the DSM I guess

Colloquially, “social anxiety” is just when you have anxiety or a phobia-type issue about social interaction, and that’s all, right? I’m beginning to think I need a more specific definition than that.

So, I have a phobia of vomiting. Not only does the immediate prospect of anyone vomiting send me into a panic (like, heart beating fast, shaking violently), I worry about it a lot. This has been a lot better recently, but for a while I worried about vomiting in some form whenever I ate anything. Not only did I go around with a higher baseline level of anxiety than usual, I was consciously worrying a lot of the time, about things like “Did I wash my hands well enough?” and “Is this food cooked thoroughly enough?” and “What if so-and-so has the stomach flu and I catch it?”

I could say that I have social anxiety. But I literally almost never have conscious worrying thoughts about social situations. I’m not afraid of messing them up. I don’t just know intellectually that I don’t need to worry, I’m not consciously worrying at all, about any particular thing that could happen, or even about the potential for me to be put on the spot in a social situation.

Being on the spot in a social situation just puts my body into stress mode. No thought required.

I’ve been going through my “read this fic later” bookmarks (most of the recent additions are Avengers/Captain America-related.) Right now I’m on “New Tricks” by OddityBoddity.

I have a nice little tangle of feelings about the first chapter, because I relate to Bucky, but… the thing that I have that kind of anxiety about is my phobia of vomiting. So at the same time as I’m like “Oh poor Bucky, I know that feeling, at least a little,” I’m also going “Fuck you, stop talking about throwing up, fuck you, no, no you do not have that feeling in the back of your throat stop it never make me think about that feeling again.”

So yeah. Sometimes I try to drown out unplesant thoughts with profanity.

I keep thinking…

“I’m doing so much better with my anxiety!”

And then anything related to a food goes less than perfectly, and I’m reminded how much trouble I still have.

Seriously though, I am doing better. Outside of times when a specific thing goes wrong, I’m spending a lot less time being anxious about this stuff. And I’m eating things that I wouldn’t have six months ago. Part of the reason I’m still feeling bad is that I’m pushing myself to do more things that make me uncomfortable. And sometimes it isn’t even pushing, it just feels natural, which is a very good sign. I’ve been able to step down a lot of my carefulness about “contamination”.

Progress.

I turned off my Tumblr blacklist a few weeks ago. It hasn’t caused me any trouble. I’ve read fic recently with mildly explicit gross things in it and that didn’t bother me, either.

I’m on a pretty good streak of eating regularly and doing useful household stuff, too.