You know how at the end of Finding Nemo, all the fish from the dentist office finally make it back to the ocean but are still trapped in those plastic bags? That's what it feels like to have anxiety.
You can see the whole ocean and all these possibilities of endless things that you want to do but you're stuck in this plastic bag and you just can't do them no matter how hard you try...except the ocean is life and the plastic bag is your brain.
All too often, people assume social anxiety is just being nervous around people or being too scared to try new things, but once again, you're wrong. Anxiety is crippling.
For example, there was this one time in college where it was raining and I didn't feel like taking the bus to class so I drove my car and parked in in an apartment building parking lot near by. As I got out of my car and began walking towards campus, a guy said to me, "You know this is a private parking lot right? You shouldn't park here, you'll probably get towed." And just that comment from a guy, probably trying to be nice and look out for me, was enough to literally wrack my body/mind with anxiety and I got back in my car, skipped class, drove home and got in bed and didn't speak to anyone for probably the rest of the night. That was about three years ago and it has still stuck with me as one of the most ridiculous bouts of anxiety I've ever had.
See the thing with anxiety is that you know it's ridiculous and unrealistic. You know this but yet you still can't break through that "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" surrounding your brain. Logically, I should have just taken that guy's advice, parked else-where and still went to class but my brain told me that just doing that one small thing like getting noticed parking in the wrong area made me the biggest failure and I would be better off hiding from anyone so I couldn't possibly fail that badly again.
Another common occurrence with me (and why most of my friends hate me, I swear), is communication, especially through texting. I'll get a text from a friend while I'm working or busy in some way and I'll tell myself I'll text them back later. Then I, more often than not, will forget to respond until the next day and when this happens, I am sent into a over-thinking spiral of, "Did I wait too long to respond that it would be weird if I respond now? Because if I say I was busy or at work they'll wonder why I didn't just respond afterward and if I say I forgot then they're going to think I didn't care enough to respond to them even though I really do care about them, I just genuinely forgot..." When this happens, I usually end up just never texting back which is really awful because that really makes it seem like I don't care at all which isn't true.
Just typing all of this out really makes me see how ridiculous it all is while also making me anxious about how absurd it actually sounds...but that's also what I'm trying to explain. While my logical mind knows that it's unrealistic and absurd, my anxious mind is looking at it through that goddamn "Finding Nemo Plastic Bag" again and can't make a hole in the bag big enough for me to calm the logic of my brain and break out into the ocean.
While my meds help with all of this a little bit, it's still quite a struggle daily. I'll talk about medication another time though, as that's a whole other lengthy explanation in which I'll probably use more crazy analogies such as cartoon fish in bags near P Sherman 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.
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