The most common search term used to find my blog and the most frequently asked question I receive in my inbox every week is “How can I tell someone I have Social Anxiety?” so it seems like not a lot of you actually talk about your anxiety disorder with the people in your life. Which I can definitely relate to as I spent so many years, especially in my teenagehood being ashamed of it. It’s a pity really though that we feel we can’t talk about it because that’s probably one of the main reasons there is so much confusion and so many assumptions made about Social Anxiety.
I wanted to find out what people would say to their friends/family if they could, and as my new obsession is the Whisper App – some of the posts are hilarious but it’s a great place to vent anonymously – I figured that would be a great place to start.
Here’s some of the Confessions about Social Anxiety I found while perusing the app..
Number 3 really resonates with me. Looking for my identity was really difficult growing up, and it sounds dumb, but answering a lot of silly personality quizzes and personality tests really helped me. It’s not the complete picture, of course, but it gave me a start of where to find myself. Aside from MBTI and the Enneagram as the most common personality typing systems, those very casual quizzes that you see in Quotev or Buzzfeed also made me learn a lot about my likes and dislikes. Even if it’s as little as choosing your sense of style based on what pictures you prefer in a quiz. . . I wasn’t able to know that about myself without trying casual aesthetic type quizzes somehow. I know it sounds a bit dumb, but again, it only gave me a sense of direction with my identity, and even if it didn’t give me answers to everything, it helped.
Just learning to write down in a list. . . all your little likes and dislikes. . . your most favorite things and least favorite things . . maybe knowing the little things about yourself will help you find patterns to the bigger things about yourself. That’s what I think.