Who am I?

Am I socially anxious?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always thought that I wasn’t socially anxious. But as time has gone on, I’ve entirely convinced myself that not only was I wrong, I was far worse than I could have ever expected. I began to question how bad my social anxiety really was.

The real indicator was the fact that I started to notice a weird pattern in how I would behave.

Whenever I was hanging out with other people, any social anxiety that I had would disappear. It was as if I never even had social anxiety. If I was with other people, I would be the one to step up and talk to the teacher, to the cashier, to whoever. If something needed to get done, I would make sure it would get done as long as there was other people around. In school, if we were in a group project, I would be the first one to try and break the ice, or be the one to crack a joke to someone even if I’ve never talked to them before.

But whenever I’m by myself, I just can’t bring myself to do these things. I’ll make a conscious effort to try and skip these things. If a self checkout is available, I’d rather check out my items by myself than talk to someone else. Even if it would end up being more of a hassle. Like for example, let’s say I had a problem with my bank. My first instinct isn’t to call the bank and try to resolve the problem, my first thought is to check their website and see if there’s a way to solve the problem, or send a support email. I’ll intentionally go out of my way to avoid talking to someone else.

It’s like there’s a barrier in my head that I’ve put up. If I’m comfortable around someone, it’s like my anxiety just disappears. But whenever I’m by myself I just can’t let my guard down and I’ll try my hardest to avoid any social confrontation.

I mean seriously, just the other day I ended up having a 20 or so minute conversation with an employee at Barnes & Noble. I was tense at first because it was someone that I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. But once I had let my guard down, I was yapping up a storm. Was it because we ended up talking about topics that I actually had interests in? I don’t get it.

Pushing P(eople Away).

This was one of the driving forces for me to finally suck it up and finish writing this whole thing.

Ever since I graduated, and especially in the past couple of months, I’ve noticed a “jealousy” that I have, for lack of a better term. I see everybody else around me, whether it’s someone that I know personally, or just people online having these friend groups where everybody gets along, plays the games they want to play, and all enjoy each other’s company.

I wish that I could have that. I wish I could join and fit in.

And yet, I also find myself struggling to join in these events, or join in the conversation. I don’t understand why. I usually already know these people, I’ve heard their voices before and interacted with them before. But I just find it so difficult to feel like I’m really a part of anything. I don’t want to seem like I’m inserting myself into these groups and forcing everyone to get along with me.

I feel like streaming plays an important role in allowing me to talk about topics with people that may or may not care about me or what I have to say, but being able to talk about the things that are on my mind is very important to me. And I’m very thankful and happy to see whenever people show up and listen to me. So I return the favor and try to listen to what other people have to say, whether it’s through a chatroom, Discord, or through their own streams.

But it all goes back to the “jealousy” thing. I’ll start to feel like I’m not good enough, like I’m not likable, and eventually I’ll want to stop streaming altogether.

So I fall back to my tried and true habit of pushing people away. I start talking to everyone less and less, until eventually it all subsides. Then I’m all alone.

I’m a failure.

This has got to be one of the biggest things that has been constantly eating away at me, and no matter what I do, I can’t escape the thought.

I think that I’m a failure. And I think a lot of the people around me think the same.

Back when I was in elementary school, I was very interested in electronics and technology. To this day, I still am as I’m sure you already know. At the time I had made nothing but straight A’s. Everybody had big expectations of me. Everyone thought that I would amount to be this genius that would go on to change the world. My teachers, other classmates, my own family, they really saw a potential in me. It wouldn’t help that in intermediate school (an uncommon in-between of elementary and middle school), I was accepted into a club for people with high academics and future potential.

For the most part, my grades were fine and would continue to be. My English grade wasn’t always the best because I hated the work involved with it, but people really saw potential in me - at least in STEM fields.

Speaking of, I would eventually go on to tour one of the STEM schools in my district, the Nesbitt Discovery Academy. At the time, I was really in awe of the entire place. It was nothing like any other school I’d seen. Enrolling in the school featured plenty benefits, it featured plenty of clubs that I would’ve been interested in, it was really an opportunity that I should’ve took.

But I didn’t want to lose my friends. So nothing ever happened.

Fast forward to now. I missed out on almost the entirety of high school because of a pandemic. I was stuck at home doing remote work, which I would begin to procrastinate on heavily, until my grades also sank. I moved during the pandemic, which meant I missed out signing up for driver education. And come senior year, when I had to return to in-person school, I started to fully realize how much I missed out on.

I never kept any of the friends that I held on to.

I felt, and still feel like a complete failure. Stuck at home every single day with income, no ability to drive, I just feel completely useless. Plenty of people had high expectations of me, hell, I had high expectations in myself. And I can’t help but think that everyone else around me thinks the same.

Yet, here I am.

Being alive.

There’s no beating around the bush with this one. I just want to be entirely transparent and say it how it is.

I have often pondered on how life would be if I was no longer around.

Death is an interesting thing, because of how little we really know. There’s no way to tell what happens after we die or how it feels to die. It’s the type of thing that you’ll eventually experience for yourself at some point, so why worry about it now?

I’m sure some people can relate to this, but when you get to a point where you feel like life has lost all of it’s meaning, you begin to wonder what death offers.

I’m in this constant loop of feeling like I’m a socially-inept, worthless failure and feeling like things would be better if I were to just end it all. But I fear death. Not as a concept, because it’s inevitable, but I just don’t want to know how it truly feels to die until my time comes.

Life has so much potential to provide happiness. I have no words to describe how life changing seeing Porter Robinson, an artist that I’ve enjoyed listening to for years, and experiencing the emotion behind his lyrics, jamming out and just forgetting everything, being around people who share the same love for his music.

I want to go places, I want to do things, I want to go to more concerts, I want to waste all of my money on useless anime figures, I want to experience things I’ve never experienced.

So it’s really hard on me. The feeling of wanting to die, but still holding on.

And I know deep down that I could never actually do something like that. Not now. Consistently, every time that I’m not home, I know that my cat is always sitting there waiting for me. Before I lived where I do now, she would wait at the window next to the front door until I got off the bus. And even now, she’ll either sit at my window waiting to see me walk by so that she can run to the door, or she’s already sitting at the door waiting.

And I cannot imagine a day where she just keeps waiting, but I never show up.

Make fun of me all you want, but this cat means the world to me. During my senior year, I came home from school one day and didn’t see her waiting for me anywhere. I tried to look for her but I didn’t find her. I started looking in places that didn’t even make sense to look, I called my mom, I called anyone I could to see if they knew where she was. She had gone missing, and I fell apart.

That night of sleep was the worst in my life. Not only could I not sleep, but when I finally did, I had the most heartbreaking dream of all time. It was as if I had just gotten up in the morning the next day, and got ready for school - cat still missing. But whenever I opened the door to go wait for the bus, she was just sitting there on the porch waiting for someone to open the door.

Then my alarm to actually wake up went off. It was all a dream.

Thanks for reading.

So, yeah. That’s how I feel about almost everything. I’ve really wanted to just have this out there for so god damn long.

I’m sorry, I know that this post has been all over the place, and is probably not written very well. Like I’ve said, I’ve really struggled with writing this for many months. I’ve shed plenty of tears in the number of times I’ve repeated writing, deleting, and rewriting this post.

And hey, especially this time, thanks for taking the time to read this.

❤️