Social Anxiety ruining my life?? :(
Hello guys.
I apologise if this post is long but please read. Thank you!
I am feeling really down about my social situation at the moment. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always really struggled with socialising and been extremely quiet around people. This is mostly because of my physical disability called Moebius Syndrome which is a neurological disorder that affects many cranial nerves and also causes facial paralysis. I have almost complete facial paralysis except a bit of movement down next to my mouth on the left side. When I try to smile, the muscle pulls down slightly which basically is no smile at all. I can’t close my lips, so my front teeth are always visible, and this means I have a lot of issues, but particularly problems pronouncing words that have a b, m, f, or th pronounciation. I am extremely embarrassed about talking to people outside of the family due to my speech impediment and this is a major factor in my social anxiety as well as just the general look of my face.
I don’t want sympathy or to be all pity-pot about my syndrome but I feel it’s important to state it in this post. I’ve been bullied and called ugly a lot, I’ve been treated literally like an alien most of my life and people have always been really weird to me. I am constantly being stared at everywhere I go, and whenever I’m in a social environment like at college, I notice people give me funny looks as if so say, “wtf is up with you?”. This only fuels my insecurity and lack of confidence, and makes me feel so awkward it’s frankly unbearable now. When people talk to me, they make a point of giving me a big forced smile like they’re trying to get me to smile since they obviously notice that I don’t express emotion through my face (I genuinely can’t do so and this causes a lot of issues.) People have asked me to smile many times before and that makes me very uncomfortable. I’ve had people ask me why I’m not talking or smiling. Heck, people have even asked me if I talk at all because of how quiet I am!
As you can tell, there’s a lot holding me back from properly socialising and I just have such bad social anxiety because of this. Because of how people act towards me and the many comments people have made to me/about me, I fear people and even though I really want to socialise and get friends, I find it virtually impossible to do so. I went to college and done three courses in total over a few years and only got TWO friends who I still talk to today and one of them comes round my house on occasion but she lives far away and because I can’t travel on my own for various reasons (mostly psychological) and have to get lifts, it’s hard to get to see her. The other friend of mine also lives about an hour away and we actually haven’t seen each other since we were at college. So I never have any friends to hang out with on a regular basis and I’ve been stuck indoors lonely and isolated. Well I have started going to the gym with my Mum every other day and that’s making me feel less depressed (I have been suffering with bouts of depression over the course of a good few years) but it isn’t helping my social anxiety very much.
I decided to apply for a science course at college again even though college made me ill with stress and anxiety. I want to go back purely because I want to become a scientist one day and this is the only way I can go about doing that. Thing is though, I had to go for an assessment day last Wednesday which was from 9am to 2pm and be in a class full of people I don’t know. This really stressed me out and I felt like I was going to be sick when I first walked into the college, I was probably extra panicky because I am not used to the college environment. But man, I felt awful especially when it came to doing a physics experiment in the lab and the teacher told us how we needed to get into pairs. I’ve always hated working in pairs/groups due to my social anxiety, it’s just the whole situation of working with someone, especially someone I’ve never met before and having to communicate with them and interact in a strict manner.
I was put with some guy and even though he was alright, he was also quite awkward and this made things a lot worse. He kind of took over with the experiment but then the teacher asked me to handle the chemicals and equipment instead of the guy so we could take it in turns. So I was freaking out fearing I would do something wrong through my anxiety, trying to place the test tubes into this machine, then having to write things down recording results. I felt like I didn’t have a clue what I was doing and found that the guy I was working with was instructing me and watching over me as my shaking hands grasped the things. Then I didn’t know what we were supposed to be writing down on the paper (the guy did but I couldn’t see his paper very well so I struggled to copy down the results.) So a few boxes were blank until the teacher helped me out and told me what to write in them. This isn’t like me, I’m a science nerd and I know the subject well, but because of my sheer anxiety and awkwardness, my brain froze and I genuinely couldn’t think of what I was doing half the time. It took me ages to finally understand what I needed to do and I felt like my brain just turned to mush. Now, if I was to have worked on my own, I wouldn’t have been so anxious and I would have done a lot better, which is bad news because if you’re a scientist, you need to be able to work in a team or with a partner and be very good at it. So right now at the rate I’m going, I’m not doing well for my dream of being a scientist.
I felt so bad for the guy I was working with because I could tell he was getting even more awkward as we went along and he didn’t hardly speak. He had a dead serious, unhappy kind of stare and I felt so annoyed with myself. Then before lunch, I was put into a small group where we had to do a logic/rational thinking task and I just fell dead silent, unable to think of anything to say and so the other members chatted to each other, totally blanking me except from when they asked certain questions and I either nodded or raised my hand. I don’t know what is wrong with me! I speak fine to my family and am very outgoing with them but as soon as I am faced with people I don’t know or people just outside of my family, I freeze and have genuinely no clue what to say a lot of the time. It’s like my brain functions in a totally different way and I feel frightened. I’m sorry this is so long and it’s kind of a mix of different things but I feel I needed to write it. I would like some advice on what I can do to boost my confidence and help me know what to say when in social situations and not feel scared about it. There’s so much more to mention on this post but because it’s so long already, I won’t bother. I’ve got the main points across anyway.
Anyone else have terrible anxiety and a severe lack of social skills like this? I feel so stupid and others can’t undedstand why I’m like this. I even begin just crying like a baby to myself when in certain situations. Like when I was in the gym yesterday, I was doing this dance class which I thought I would force myself to do just to face my fear and the first thing the instructor said to me was, “Can you smile for me?” She’s a nice woman I must note and was just being jolly trying to get us all to smile and I had to tell her no. She was like “No? Why?” And my mum stepped in telling her about my disability. The woman looked really guilty and apologised and I felt like crying. I always cry to myself for some reason when people say things like this. I guess it’s because I just really wish I could smile and be like other people but it will never be possible, unless scientists find a way to cure this disability one day.
Oh just want to say, I have so many daydreams of me being in a group of like-minded friends, hanging out an I also have visions of having a boyfriend (I’m 20 years old, female and never had a boyfriend before.) This makes me so depressed because I know I’ll probably never have this.
Anyway, thank you very much for reading! Sorry to rant on.
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Originally Posted by Peter A
ATB
