Social Anxiety

I worked in customer service for exactly one summer. Behind the cash register, I was totally dysfunctional. My coworkers saw me and treated me like I was retarded. Functionally I was. I forgot everything. I lived in constant fear of interaction and responsibility. 

I started to think that maybe I really was stupid. Whenever I was around other people in my youth, for example, in school, working on dreaded “group project,” I couldn’t retain anything anyone would tell me. I was not an effective member of any team. A non-contributor. People would look at me in the face and say things and they would bounce right off my forehead. More likely off the side of my head, because I wouldn’t look at them in the eyes. Not for a long time. 

It didn’t make sense. I was at this job, the valedictorian of my high school, surrounded by mediocre students and drop outs who all thought me to be fucking retarded, with greater sureness the more time we spent together. It made me sad. 

It finally made sense to me yesterday. At 24. 

I wasn’t stupid, I was just anxious.

When you’re taking a test, in school, or listening to a lecture, it’s not about you. Nobody is taking time out of their day and focusing just on You. You might as well not even be there. You can dissociate. That is where I was “Smart.” Where I could dissociate. 

Any situation that involved… Me… like my face, and my voice, and my active participation, cut my mental faculties down to about half. I could not detach. Everything was too personal. Any interaction with any person in any context was too personal. Always too much. 

And then I went to college. And then I discovered drugs: Weed. Alcohol. Psychedelics. Sex. And then I started looking people in the eyes. And slowly, painfully, it became easier to Dissociate and Think in the presence of others.

And I wonder if this is a skill that everyone Needs to develop consciously or I was uniquely stunted at some point in my development and had to pathetically deliberately force my way back into functional social form. Or maybe it's the screens.

This is why I don’t call people Stupid. I know that some people are really different when they’re around People. My people. I understand them. I was them. And maybe I still am. But definitely not as much. Not as often. Not as debilitatingly. Thankfully.