People Without Anxiety Don’t Understand Anxiety.
I’ve had this horrible message I received on facebook, saying horrible things about someone I care a lot about, floating around in my head for the past week or so.
Apparently, there’s this notion that having relationships, having a job, speaking at rallies, goofing around with friends, and sometimes even just having friends completely nullifies any statement of having social anxiety.
- The ability to have a partner (or even multiple partners) doesn’t mean a person doesn’t have social anxiety. Just because I am in a relationship doesn’t mean that I don’t find myself fighting every so often to try and maintain control of how I react to the relationship from time to time. It just means that I do have to work extra hard if I want it to work.
- The ability to have a job doesn’t mean that a person isn’t pushing as hard as they can to hold it up. It doesn’t mean that they won’t go home at the end of the day and fall into that slumped desire to be perfectly alone because their social experiences of the day- being exposed to so many different people- haven’t exhausted them. Then again, some people with social anxiety are perfectly fine dealing with people at work. Sometimes, you can put on a mask and deal with the day, and it feels better.
- Participating in / speaking at rallies doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have social anxiety. I don’t intend to speak towards anyone else’s experience but my own on this one, but, sometimes, when you feel strongly enough about something, you feel that you have to be a part of it. And sometimes (as happened to me when I participated in Slutwalk Seattle), being around enough other people who feel just as strongly about it as you do make you feel strong enough to yell and scream and maybe even just talk, but to really be a part of the moment.
- Goofing around with friends- even in public- doesn’t mean that a person doesn’t have social anxiety. In my experience, if I can have a strong enough relationship with someone, I tend to feel better when I’m with that person. In high school, I could go around the mall and be a regular, obnoxious teenager just like anyone else, because I wasn’t alone- I was with people who made me feel more comfortable.
None of these invalidate anyone’s social anxiety. I’m seriously so disgusted at these assumptions (especially because they were brought up to me by someone I’d thought of as a friend, as they attempted to invalidate someone I care about by using the exact same kinds of things that I’ve experienced as a reason that she was a liar).
Last week, I mentioned in passing to my study group in class that I have horrible social anxiety. Both of them were astonished- which is understandable. I’m not sure where people get this idea that everyone with social anxiety just sits in a ball in the corner of a room. I can talk in class just fine. I can present (a bit shaky-handed, but no harm otherwise). I can, more-or-less, deal in group situations. But these things don’t change the fact that, often after a long day, I find myself curling up in my closet trying to find some alone time, or going over and over and over and over and over everything I said for the next day or two. I can make phone calls, but that doesn’t change the fact that it often takes me upwards of ten minutes to work myself up to the point that I can use the phone.
Just because a person’s social anxiety doesn’t manifest itself the way you want it to does not invalidate their identity. Don’t be such an ableist shit.
Perfectly said. Just because somebody has developed some coping methods that allow them to be at least relatively functional does not mean they don’t have the disorder. It means they’re working hard to live with that disorder. We can’t all give up and curl into a ball and depend on somebody to pay our bills for our whole lives so we can give in to our anxiety. We have to manage our problems and find a way to live with them.
It’s okay to have trouble understanding how it works. It’s not okay to call someone a liar or decide their anxiety doesn’t exist just because you don’t understand how it works. That’s a fucked up thing to do and just ends up making you look like an asshole and a fool. Please keep that in mind, readers…
