To anyone who has observed me at a gathering that contains more than five or six other people, especially other people I don't know, it should be glaringly obvious that I don't handle those situations well. I wander around, settling on the outskirts of groups and listen and laugh. I find a place to sit and pretend to focus on my drink or some coffee table book I've found. Or I wander outside and stare at the sky.
When I go to bookstores or the comic shop and the clerk who's helping me wants to (or pretends to want to) start a conversation, I have trouble stumbling out short, to the point answers that tend to cut off any possible continuation of speaking.
It's not that I don't want to mingle or converse with people. It's that I can't. I can open my mouth and say a little, or nothing, or I can keep my mouth shut.
Not being able to communicate, for lack of a better word, has sort of hurt me since I moved here more than two years ago. Yes, I'm friendly with the people at work, but I'm not friends with them. (I don't even know if I want to be friends with them.) In my time here, I haven't made any friends.
Which is what brought me to yesterday.
Yesterday, I sat down and spoke with a therapist (well, a licensed clinical social worker, to be technical) about my anxiety.
He asked me a little bit about my family. He wanted to know where I grew up and if I had any friends then. I talked about going to school and how thought-free I think my job is. We talked about my lack of drinking and dating. And when he asked me if I had any hobbies, I froze and said I didn't have any, but that I liked reading.
I said I didn't want to start off with doing the drug thing if I didn't have to.
He used the word "shy" a lot. It's a word I don't like. Shy is a toddler being pulled around at a family reunion, shown to relatives he's never met, and this toddler clings to his mother's legs. Shy is an eight-year old being introduced to a very old relative in an old folks home and she can barely bring herself to say "Hello." Shy is not what I feel (paralyzed is more like it), but he used that word quite a bit. It was starting to get on my nerves.
He told me about me meditation and sort of rolled his eyes when I told him I've tried it. He explained to me how it's supposed to work and when I told him that while the big voice in my head is thinking breathe, breathe I've never been able to quiet the little voice in the back of my head chattering away about the processes our body uses to burn the oxygen and create energy, he either didn't believe me, or thought I was nuts. I'm still not sure which.
Then he mentioned a group session for people with social anxiety disorder. I'm still having trouble getting over the oxymoronical (Is that a word?) nature of that statement. I asked him if it's just a bunch of people sitting around, not making eye contact, in an awkward silence. He said that it does a lot of people good. And, without actually saying it, he suggested that if I don't want to take pills right away that this would be the best course.
Sure, he said that I could set up appointments with him and just do that for a while, but my HMO is all about getting things fixed quick and since my anxiety problem has been with me for a long, long time, we wouldn't be able to hit the root of the problem quickly, if ever. (If I was getting anxious because of my boss, or something, he said he'd be better able to help.) He did say he could try to help me find a long term person, but that brought up my trust stuff and he actually admitted that lots of therapists out there are sketchy and shouldn't be trusted as much as they are.
So, next week I go to an orientation for the anxiety group stuff. There may or may not be another one starting soon. It may or may not be from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM during the week, if it hasn't started already. I may or may not have to use up two and a half hours each week of my sick time to do this.
I'm pretty much scared poopless and keep thinking that I should just go by to my hermit ways and never thing about this again.
(PS Comments are off. I don't feel like getting messages that say, "blah blah blah good for you" or "blah blah blah here for you" or "blah blah blah better" or "blah blah blah asshole" or "blah blah blah fucking dumbass" or "blah blah blah abs diet." Thanks for thinking those things, though, if you are.)