You ever have an epiphany, forget you had it, and rerealize it?
I recently rerealized that some people who think they like me actually like who they think I would be if I magically stopped having social anxiety and became more confident. People don't like "Bad Vibes" so having a mental illness that makes you permanently a bit neurotic makes you less appealing, less attractive.
I tend to assume people who post, share, or say things like this are all upper middle class white Yoga Girls who assume everyone else has similarly stable life circumstances to them and would jump at the chance to cut off anyone upset about their marginalization.
I get super confused when Black people do it! Like, do they also believe in Black-on-Black crime? Or do they give life advice oriented around bootstraps?
(The funny thing is, I've found that secure people don't have as much of a problem with my anxiety because they are so internally stable that they aren’t afraid of others’ negative emotions. They also don’t seem to believe in The Secret or The Law of Attraction or other You-Control-Your-Destiny borderline-neoliberal nonsense. It's mostly other insecure people who are like "quit complaining and perform confidence already. I don't want to be infected with your doubt.")
On a positive personal note, I don’t get infected with other’s doubt. I usually either just calm them or commiserate.
Seeking the conditional approval of such people easily leads to self-rejection or pretending to be someone you’re not in order to keep up the image of #girlbosshood, #blesseditude, #grind, #livelaughlove or whatever other hashtag can be wielded to blame people for their circumstances. Honestly, all motivational speakers should be required to share their economic background, salary, and wealth so we can judge the merits of their advice on those with less.
Thankfully, I am not and have not been suicidal, and I know that less severe mental illness is a privilege, in a way. I only need to look at my relatives to see how much more severe my situation could be and how much more limited my options could be.
My favorite situation ever is when folks with objectively more comfortable lives grow frustrated with you for having a mental illness directly tied to your social class.
My anxiety makes sense for my upbringing—it’s an adaptation my brain developed to survive while protecting itself. Although my current situation is different and that adaptation make no longer serve me, there are a lot of situational factors that remind my brain of my upbringing, triggering a return of the anxiety. It mades sense to be anxious then, and it feels like it makes sense now.
I’m working on changing my material reality in order to prove my worse fears unwarranted. Until then, I’d like to be allowed to be anxious. Hiding it is just extra psychic labor.
Despite being board-certified as a big-brain genius recently (more on that later), I don’t plan to share my IQ (since IQ is little more than a tool of white supremacy anyway), nor do I plan to practice any new forms of rankism or hierarchy.
EXCEPT! when it’s dumbo jumbo! like this!
This thought system is objectively stupid and I am objectively more intelligent than anyone who believes it and it objectively hurts any and all arguments in which it’s used.
Why are you vibrating? Just be a good person in a normal human way! Better yet, go read some Maslow, please!
There is a nonzero chance that I may remain anxious forever, though. I will definitely get better at managing it, but it'll probably never fully go away. What then?
I am fine with being in a constant state of becoming, but not if the end state is necessary to impress others. Maybe some will give up on me. Most likely I will learn to wear the mask of confidence around those who need it and reveal my full & messy self to the rare folks who don't mind reality.
These kinds of positive-vibes-only vibrational-magic mental health memes seem to be vague enough that anyone could twist their meaning to make themselves “high vibration” and the people they dislike to be “low vibration”.
They also seem to have lot of embedded judgements—how can you tell someone is being inauthentic, for example? Only they can truly know that.
I think I generally have an issue with giving other people mental health labels, though; especially if you aren’t a trained professional.
I often wish there were more role model for how to live openly with anxiety.
Someone with humor, someone with knowledge, someone who accepts their flaws and quirks as well as their strengths, someone who knows enough of the science that they won’t engage with all this blame-your-own-efforts nonsense.... Some living embodiment of the Serenity prayer who accepts what they can’t change and changes what they can’t accept.
For a while, the only example I could think of for a celebrity with social anxiety was Ryan Reynolds.
But more recently, I have been vicariously comforted by a defense of SZA, whose occasional hiatuses make more sense if she has social anxiety.
Given that, I guess I could look for celebrities who have vanished from the limelight for a while, and it's likely that a few of them also have SAD. A quick search reveals Andre 3000 also struggles with it. I really his friends and family don’t tell him to just take a deep breath and stop worrying. Although I can totally see Erykah Badu telling him something like “Your frequency is too low for me right now. Suck it up or pack it up.”
Now this I agree with!
My first long-term therapist--also my best and favorite therapist--liked to challenge me to think less about shoulds, musts, obligations, and "the right way to be a human being" and to think instead about what I want and need for myself and others.
I want to be authentic as I grow, I want to be honest about who I am, I want to accept myself more fully, and meet people willing to accept my full self. That may mean accepting that I may occasionally need to ask folks "Are you mad at me?" at the big age of 85.
I may lose friends over that, I may seem annoying or cringe or needy or so on, but so be it. I would rather be uncertain than overconfident or confidently wrong—we have enough of that in the world right now.
In the big picture of foibles and flaws, mine aren't so bad.