Just felt like sharing. So... this morning I realised that it's been pretty much 20 years since the events that originally triggered my social anxiety (I was 14yo, in Year 9 at high school). I only found a label for it about 5 years ago though. While it has never been debilitating, it has always just lingered, and the 20 year old memories are still clear in my mind whenever I feel like feeling sorry for myself. Over the years and over 100 self help books, I've tried many different tactics and exercises to try to ease my reaction and symptoms to social anxiety. They've all worked, mostly temporarily before falling back to old patterns, some have stuck with me though and have helped with the occasional awkward social situation. This morning while I was walking to work, I realised something important: I've always been "fixing" my social anxiety, but I've never made the decision to 'not have it'. So from this point on, I've decided to not have social anxiety any more and not label myself as such. I'm in the frame of mind and time of my life where I've now said to myself "After 20 years, it's time to get over it". And that's that.
I remember reading somewhere that it's stupid to learn to live with your social anxiety, when what you should do is to overcome it completely. I have had social anxiety for many years, too. It used to be a lot stronger just some months back, but recently it has started to fade away because I was so tired of having all those irrational thoughts and got pissed at myself for acually believing they were true. I were also put through therapy, but I stopped with that after a while as it made me feel so ashamed of myself. Much better now though, and I'm glad you decided for just saying no to it. Hopefully things will become even better for you too
I think that's a big part of it. Noticing irrational and illogical thoughts for what they are. Also had another interesting and somewhat related realisation during this morning's walk. After making many mistakes and having many negative and regretful experiences over the last 20 years, many of which have replayed in my mind hundreds of times, I've realised that I didn't learn the most important lesson from them. The reason that they happened was that I was constantly dishonest with myself / about myself. Mainly surrounding my sexuality.
