Where It Started

Taking a break from talking about writing this week to talk about something I’ve been pondering a lot lately.

Social anxiety is something that has been with me my entire life. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious in social situations. As you can guess, this has led to difficulties for me in several different areas. When I was a kid, I struggled to make and keep friends and would have panic attacks even thinking about going to stay at someone’s house. As a teenager I became increasingly agoraphobic to the point that I only really left the house to go to school. And now as an adult, my energy for “social” situations is so low that I’m not even capable of running errands after work if I have to spend the day in the office.

My social anxiety and my threshold for simply existing in public places is something I’ve been working on since I was in high school, always trying to push myself further, to build up a tolerance with the hopes of someday being able to do the “normal” things that everyone else can do without exhausting myself, causing myself severe anxiety or spending hours carefully planning out every single moment of my day to help myself cope.

And for a long time, I felt like I was failing. I’ve had multiple therapists get frustrated with me, thinking I’m not trying hard enough while, simultaneously, I was pushing myself to burn out trying to meet their expectations. Not only did I get the constant feedback from society and the people in my life that I was broken, my therapists, who were supposed to be helping me, were often giving me the same response.

Then I was diagnosed with ADHD, and then I discovered I was autistic. After decades of feeling broken and not understanding why these things were so much harder for me than they were for other people, I finally uncovered this piece of how my brain works that showed me everything I was doing — everything my therapists had been instructing me to do — were not only never going to work, but they were actively exposing me to triggers and stimuli that my brain was simply never going to be able to adapt to. I was trying to force my brain to act like a neurotypical brain and retraumatizing myself over and over again.

When I got my diagnosis for ADHD I was still seeing one of the problematic therapists mentioned above. I also had a doctor at that time that delegitimized all of my experiences and refused to believe any of the issues I was pursuing answers for. I had to argue with both of them to get the referral to Neuro-Psych to get the diagnosis. Thankfully, the person who diagnosed me was a lot more knowledgable than both of them and reassured me that not only did I have ADHD, my case was one of the easiest ones to diagnose he’d had in a while.

By the time I got my autism diagnosis a year, I had a new doctor and was between therapists, but the thing I struggled with most letting go of during that time was that when I came back with my ADHD diagnosis both that doctor and that therapist challenged me with a question that I really hate.

“What does this diagnosis do for you?”

See, both of those practitioners were of the “I don’t really like labels” type, which I’ve learned to recognize as a huge red flag in healthcare. They talk like they care more about the people than the diagnosis, but how it actually plays out in reality is the caregiver delegitimizes the reality of their patients. They tend not to understand that diagnosis on its own can have a huge impact on someone’s life.

WHERE IT’S AT

And that disconnect is what makes all the difference. In the two years since I was diagnosed with autism, I’ve got a new doctor and a new therapist. I’ve done tons of research and connected with several different communities, which have taught me about autism, ADHD, and neurodivergence in general. Most importantly, I’ve seen other people struggling with the same things.

I’ve seen them reach out to the communities and I’ve seen them get support. I’ve seen them beat themselves up over the same thing I beat myself up over and I’ve watch the community reassure them that they’re not broken. All of this has helped me recognize when I’m talking down to myself and it has helped model for me how to go easier on myself.

I stopped beating myself up for not being able to run those errands after work. I stopped feeling guilty for ordering my groceries instead of getting them myself. I stopped forcing myself to attend social events that made me feel uncomfortable. I started telling myself, “That’s okay. This is too much right now. I can do it later.” Or, “These services are provided specifically to help people who are unable to meet these needs through ‘normal’ routes, and that includes me. It’s okay to utilize them.”

And you know what? I’ve actually found myself stepping outside of some of my normal boundaries. Sometimes I go out and make a spontaneous spot because I see something as I’m passing by that looks interesting. I’ve started going into public places by myself. I’ve run errands after work.

Not a lot, by any means. And I’m never going to suddenly turn into a social butterfly. But allowing myself the room to just be who and how I am, has opened more doors for me to do things I never felt comfortable doing before. Leaving behind the guilt and the shame attached to so may of these tasks has allowed me to. choose to do those tasks rather than feel obligated.

What I’ve learned is that I will always have social anxiety to some extent. And I will probably always experience more than most of the people around me. But trying to fight against these realities has never helped me. It’s only through acceptance and being gentle with myself that I have made any progress at all.

So if you’re struggling with something, especially something which causes you a lot of guilt and shame, I highly suggest you seek out an avenue of acceptance and kindness. It can be difficult at first, when you’re used to motivating through shame (our society is big on that), but it gets easier the more you practice it, and I think you’ll find that things will start to change for the good and it will feel so natural that you almost forget how hard it used to be.