Introverts and Manners

[vrimj]

Social Anxiety seems to be a popular problem these days. I am not so disturbed by strangers that I require a diagnosis or medication, but I am not fond of having to deal with people I don't know well in person (or over the phone) and the more personal the reason I must deal with a person I don't know well the less happy I am. This has actually

Comments

[tyrianmollusk]

So, you said you fear giving people information and you fear people reacting to information you give them. You could address that fear by expecting people to be adults and seeking good ways to convey and receive information, or you could subscribe to a system that replaces being an adult with a system that lets you pretend you don't need to be afraid. The problem with such a system is that it makes the fear and the difficulty *more* real and drives a wedge between you and the you that you show to people. Placing "manners" over people harms people, as it harms communication. If you think executing those rules makes you more pleasant and safer, you are incorrect. It's *after* you relax on those rules that you become pleasant and interesting.

There's nothing wrong with being scared, and good people will allow you space for that if you let them. Acting despite fears, you will see that the fear of not knowing what you are supposed to do is exactly what makes it hard to just do what you *would* do. Your fear created the idea that you are "supposed" to do some thing, as well as the idea that what *you* choose won't be the "right" thing. You encourage your fear by justifying the need to do the right thing over honestly accepting yourself and others.

You want others to live by your rules so that you can pretend your fear isn't the problem. You want everyone else to change, your fear to be everyone else's responsibility. You also want to protect your fear, to hide in a system where no one is allowed to say something like this to you, to question the law of your fear, to say that your fear might be a problem -- that it might be *your* problem.

You aren't naturally scared: you work at it every day, as you were taught.

Of course, with enough practice and information, you can pretend you aren't anxious, so you clearly don't have "real" social anxiety. Just like some other person only needs to lock their door 23 times to know it's locked, not like those poor people with "real" OCD problems. You're better and stronger than "those" people.

Also, to say there is more social anxiety, one would have to be able to say how much there used to be, and I seriously doubt we can do that. What the internet has actually bred is socializing, especially among those less likely to have done much before and about topics people hid more than not in the past, and that's assuming previous ages/generations even had as much time for socializing as we do now, with networks making people always one button away, even during work.

Simply avoiding mistakes is impossible. Make them, accept them, learn from them, and help others do likewise.