Can Social Anxiety Be Overcome?
Papi, I want to meet new people without the accompanying terror
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¡Hola Papi!
I’m in my early thirties. Last year, I gave up drinking. It’s been nice, and I haven’t felt compelled to pick it up again! Lately, I’ve started trying to go out more and to be more socially active in an effort to socialize beyond the bar. It’s working, but the problem is, I have so much social anxiety and social imposter syndrome. “You don’t belong here,” the anxiety tells me. “These people pity you and talk about you when you leave.”
I haven’t felt social imposter syndrome since high school, and I hate feeling it now. It makes it hard to feel at ease, which makes the social anxiety worse. I thought I got over this when I first went to college, but now it’s coming up again in my post-drinking world.
The other issue is that I’m meeting people that I feel intensely eager to connect with as friends. I haven’t felt this vulnerable in a long time! I’m in a happy relationship and so are these people, but I just want them to like me and I want to be closer to them. What if they don’t feel the same way? What if it’s cringey that I want to get closer to them? What if they’re just humoring me, and the niceness and connection I feel is built on politeness? Why is having human feelings so deeply embarrassing?
I know I need to be more compassionate to myself, but it’s hard. I know I need confidence, but I don’t know where to start. I think about a recent time I went out to the club when I wanted so badly to go dancing, but the fear of being seen was so physically painful that all I could do was stand there.
So, how do I get out of my head and into my body? How do I stop worrying about how I’m perceived? How can I make friends effortlessly without coming on too strong, but also without making them feel like I’m not interested? And how do I do it all without the help of alcohol?
Signed,
The Imposter
Hey there, Imposter!
I think a lot of people, myself included, can relate to your letter. It’s incredibly embarrassing to be an adult with a Roth IRA and still be walking away from social interactions with thoughts like, Did they like me? Did I say the wrong thing? Are they talking about how weird I am since I left? Am I God’s most hated creation? Personally, it’s likely I will still be doing this at 136 years old after my consciousness is uploaded to The Cloud, where I will exist as a bodiless line of code, wondering if the other bodiless lines of code I just met have decided to make a private server without me.
I go back and forth on the term “imposter syndrome” as a descriptor for the suite of anxieties that attend meeting new people or being put in challenging social interactions. It’s nice to have a file to put those unruly, chaotic emotions under. But at the same time, I don’t think my problem is that I’m faking it. I know several people who’ve read Judith Butler. I understand that everyone is performing.Everyone is an actor, an imposter, in a way. I don’t know about you, but my problem is that my performance sucks. If anything, the issue is that I’m either too cold and aloof, or too eager to expose my real self to someone I desperately want to get to know. As it turns out, my “real self” is apparently an eighth-grader who just wants the cool kids to acknowledge him as worthy.