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Zyrusticae · **05-15-2015, 05:14 PM**

Man, you guys are great. I really appreciate the support. I'm... uh, well, I'm still a bit anxious, and kind of had to force myself to even look at the thread, but it certainly lightens the load to read some of these comments.

(05-15-2015, 03:40 PM)Faye Wrote:

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I don't think anyone is meaning to imply you're being disingenuous, I think there's just some confusion because you've tried to push for social anxiety to be labeled "cute," or that it's "not that bad" and just a personality quirk, which is a baffling concept to anyone with a deep and personal understanding of social anxiety. It easily leads someone to believe that you don't have a clear understanding of what social anxiety is, or that the only kind you acknowledge and know of is incredibly mild.

The realities of social anxiety are:

- Difficulty forming and keeping relationships with other people
- Difficulty leaving the house or running errands (and this includes to do important things, like buy groceries when you have no food, going to a medical appointment, filling the nearly empty gas tank in your car, etc.)
- Difficulty making phone calls (once again for potentially important things, like refilling a prescription that's run out, calling your workplace to tell them you're sick today, etc.)
- Difficulty even leaving your room/getting out of bed if you live with other people
- Difficulty finding and keeping a job, or difficulty attending school and keeping your grades up
- Panic attacks (which feel like you're literally dying)
- Shortness of breath, increased heart rate, sweating, dizziness,
- Acid reflux, stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, digestive problems
- Insomnia, sore muscles, headaches, exhaustion, problems with your teeth from reflux or grinding
- Long term effects of stress like stomach ulcers, skin problems, aging more quickly, weight loss/gain etc.
- Potential to spiral into depression, including self-harm and suicide
- Potential to develop a dependency on drugs or alcohol or other addictions to cope
- Money spent on therapy and medications
- Side effects from those medications, as well as the fact that starting a new antidepressant typically worsens anxiety until your body adjusts
- Potential to get addicted to medications prescribed for your anxiety (i.e. Xanax)

Looking at the realities many people with social anxiety face (and that was only to name a few of the more objective/common ones), it can sound absolutely ludicrous to expect people to find it to be a cute and endearing condition, or one that's easy to brush aside or cope with, so I believe some of us are under the impression you don't really understand what social anxiety is and that you've simply made a shy character rather than a character legitimately afflicted with social anxiety.

As far as the theory that social anxiety is "a part of your personality," I can promise you, it's not. You know it's not you when it happens. It feels wrong and foreign, probably not much different than how a transgender person knows they were born the wrong sex. You just know it's wrong, it's not you. Plenty of people afflicted with social anxiety are actually outgoing or extroverted, our anxiety just squanders that part of us and it's painful not being able to express who you know you really are.

I think a large part of it is simply because I tend to use that sort of mindset as a coping mechanism, as trying to grapple with the actual enormity of the problem becomes paralyzing in the exact way that AmarchiA is talking about it. Even now, I'm distracting myself from it all by... posting crap on the internet, heh. But I can see that it isn't exactly the best way to deal with it, and from the perspective of outside observers it certainly looks like I am downplaying the disorder as something mild when it is not such in many cases.

I will certainly refrain from doing such in the future, and will defer to actual personality traits wherever possible unless I decide I actually want to make it a point to explore such disorders in RP (something that I will likely only do with folks I can trust to handle it).

I should note that I am still profoundly fascinated by heavily "damaged" characters - characters that are so ill or disabled that they are heavily dependent on others for assistance. It hits all of my sympathy buttons. Gives me "feels", so to speak. I know that, in many ways, these characters are tragic, sad, often lonely, and that is a large part of what makes them so appealing to me.

But I also understand now that not everyone feels that way about such characters, and furthermore, some things are just too tragic or serious to make light of, especially in our escapism and entertainment. I also probably should not conflate such feelings with anything to do with the word "cute", heh. Sympathetic, maybe. Sad, yes. I think my choice of words may have been really poor to begin with. I hope to improve on that.

(05-15-2015, 04:18 PM)ArmachiA Wrote:

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To add, one of the WORST things about the disorder is constantly worrying about if it will kick in when you do something new or... anything at all. Again, I'm not shy, but if I get invited to a party, or invited to a movie, or an amusement park (Which I LOVE AMUSEMENT PARKS) I have to spend the next few days deciding whether or not I can even go or if my disorder is going to come up and make everything embarrassing and awful. You can't spring something on me that day. "Want to go to a movie in an hour?" is not possible with me, unless your my mom, you have to give me 24 hours notice generally. I hate that because I'm pretty spontaneous, before I had the disorder (It started when I was 25) I would just go do whatever I wanted, no problem.

I like traveling. I also know if I travel the first time in a hotel I'll have a panic attack. I went to New York City and Las Vegas last year, both times the first night my brain was telling me to go home even though I WANTED TO BE THERE. Traveling is hard. I have to make sure it's something I really want to do before I decide to go because I know what it means. It means a panic attack.

It's beneath the surface all the time. And you worry about it all the time. And it's awful - the disorder becomes being afraid of the disorder. It took me 5-6 years to control it on the level I do now. I went from having 3-4 panic attacks a week to having 1-2 a year. But it is not an easy road and I can slip at any time.

And I know that. And it's terrifying.

Wow, I had no idea it could kick in that late in someone's life. That sounds incredibly rough. I can scarcely imagine what it's like to be relatively normal one day and suddenly be experiencing crippling anxiety the next.

You have all of my sympathy. It's good that you're improving, and I'm certainly hoping to improve myself, such that maybe I'll finally, one day, be able to buckle up and find work that wasn't granted to me by sheer nepotism. I hope you can get over those humps as well. It's damn rough out there even without the disorder holding you back.

On playing characters with mental illnesses

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes