The truth is that I’m afraid. Not afraid for my life, afraid for my safety, or afraid of any number of scary things. But afraid of people. All people. I don’t know how to talk to them. Every time I try I have a major anxiety attack. Just the process of ordering food, or making a phone call makes me feel like I my chest is going to explode, that I can’t breathe, and that I need to vomit, all simultaneously. No matter how many times I repeat the same interaction, the feeling never goes away. I’ve learned to live with it, but never to overcome it.

I’ve felt this fear my entire life, but it’s grown worse over time, to the point where my entire life is starting to become defined by that fear. Regardless of what I may have told people, this is the real reason why I haven’t finished my college education. I just couldn’t spend every day in an almost constant panicked state, dreading Spanish class, fearing the moment where I’d be called upon to speak in front of the whole class. It was easier to just not go to Spanish, than to have to worry about what could happen.

That’s really the problem. It’s the constant worry, and fear, of what could happen. The game of “What if?” that consistently leads to dwelling upon the worst possible outcome. I spend every moment of every day thinking about all the things that could possibly go wrong, what the worst outcome of every interaction could be. It’s safer, and less painful, to minimize all interactions than to have to constantly worry about what will happen.

This isn’t limited to potential future actions though. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve repeated events over and over in my head, trying to think of ways that they could have gone better, or come to a more satisfactory conclusion, but really just dwelling on every mistake that I made. This process of living, and reliving, all the what if moments turns one into quite an overthinker, never able to live in the moment, doomed to a Hamletesque game of paralytic doubt.

This doubt, and fear, has consumed every moment of my existence. I’m incapable of initiating a social exchange, and the few times when I do find myself in one I interpret every action as negative. I’ve placed so little worth on myself, and my abilities, that I honestly can’t believe that anyone else would place any value on me either. Intellectually I can tell myself that this isn’t true, but I don’t feel it. I can’t ever remember feeling that anyone outside my family viewed me in a positive light.

This world view has cost me every friend that I’ve ever had, and made it near impossible to make new ones. I’m never to put aside my worries about what people think about me, and just relax and be myself. Every minute feels like a job interview, like I’m trying to make a good impression. Eventually the doubt overcomes me, and I become paranoid, untrusting, and not much fun to be around. Anyone who’s put up with it for any amount of time is a better person than me. I wish that I could stop myself, but the awareness of what I’m doing doesn’t stop the underlying feelings that create the behavior. It’s to the point now where I just don’t have any friends, and my social life is non-existent.

Making friends is hard enough, but dating is impossible. I’m completely unable to even attempt to ask someone out. Just the thought of it creates an overwhelming panic attack. I’m barely able to function for days afterwards. In my entire life I’ve only been able to work up the courage to try a couple times. Every time it’s been such a pathetic, unconfident, failure that I was met with an overwhelmingly negative response. Which just feeds into the fear cycle, as I incorporate the past failures into my future outlook, making it even harder to contemplate future attempts.

So I’m left alone, friendless, and with very dim prospects for the future as the few people that I do socialize with, all family members, pair off and leave me feeling even more alone. Because that’s the worst of it. I feel desperately lonely, but lack the skills to overcome my crippling fear and change my circumstances.

In the last year and a half this loneliness has left me feeling pretty majorly depressed. The days where I don’t spend the majority of my time feeling bad are few and far between. Mostly I just think over and over about things that I could have done differently, or wishing that I had the courage to say something. This isn’t to say that I just sit around moping (though there is a share of that, particularly in the last three months or so), I have my manic stages too, where I throw myself wholeheartedly into one project or another, only to abandon it at a later date. The times when it’s the worst is at night when I’m the only one awake. It feels like the darkness is closing in on me, like things will never get any better. I never used to cry, but during this time it’s been happening more and more often.

I’ve trained myself not to show this face to the world. I have to put on a normal face every day, wear it out into the world, and to work. Because what could be more humiliating, and be met with more negative social reaction, than admitting that I’m unhappy. You don’t tell people the truth when they ask you how things are going. It’s better to just lie as say that you’re fine. So I wear my fine face.

The truth is that there was a point where I didn’t know that I could carry on this way anymore, that it was getting too hard, so I created a lie. A lie for myself and for everyone else. A lie to somehow make it easier to keep going. I started telling everyone that a gypsy in India foretold the day that I’d die. That I’d die on October 22, 2012. But it was really just me telling myself that. It somehow made it easier to keep going on if I could just tell myself that it would only be for 4 more years. I could cope with anything for that long couldn’t I? Everything negative experience is easier if you know when it’s going to end. This isn’t to say that I plan on killing myself then, but only that I created this idea in my head that somehow it’ll all be over then, so that I could make it. I don’t know why this helped, but it did. Nothing really changed, but someone everything became a little easier.

But recently my own doubt has started to creep up over the top of this self deception. When I was in Austin for Fantastic Fest my cell phone stopped working. So I spent a couple days with virtually no contact with my entire existing social network. Here I was in a strange place, not really knowing anyone, and with no one to talk to. It was terrifying, and very lonely. Thinking objectively, I was surrounded by people that I shared a lot in common with, many of whom were in a similar situation of not knowing anyone, and I should have talked to them. But I was far too afraid to initiate conversation. So instead, I just didn’t really talk to anyone for a couple days. Even though I was in a movie buffs paradise (the Alamo Drafthouse) watching some awesome movies, I couldn’t help but be miserable. It was an extremely difficult experience that gave me a glimpse into the path that my life is on. I don’t know that I can spend another fifty or sixty years being that lonely, living that life. It was just a horrifying thought that pushed past all the walls, and deceptions that I’d created to protect myself. I don’t know exactly how to cope with the realization.

Over the years I’ve done quite a bit of research into others who have similar life experiences, which has led me again and again to the conclusion that I have an anxiety disorder, most likely Social Anxiety Disorder (or social phobia). It often really starts affecting people during adolescence, and early adulthood, and can often lead to depression. My first instinct is to discount the idea that I have some sort of mental/emotional disorder as just me being a hypochondriac (which has been known to happen). Am I just looking for something to blame my own mistakes, my own inability to overcome my fear, on? Or is this something real? I don’t know what to say.

Even if I did know what to think about that idea, I doubt that I’d do anything about it. The idea of seeking treatment for something that’s, more or less, my defining personality trait seems wrong. I don’t know if I’d be the same person without the fear. It’s part of who I am. If I get rid of it am I still me? I want to feel like me, but I’m not happy the way I am.

So the truth is that I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m miserable, and afraid. So if anyone wondered why I haven’t been writing much lately this is why. I just didn’t see the point anymore.