Anyone else extremely paranoid at school? I’m quite introverted and quiet but I have friends, they mean a lot to me for helping me survive. For your information I live in the Detroit metro area and go to a public high school in a very rich suburb. I’m sure some of you can relate to this but going to school in a rich area sucks. I have a decent amount of people I talk to at school, but I’m still pretty introverted and quiet. I’ve been dealing with a number of issues since I entered high school (I’m a senior now)- Anxiety, depression, ADD, OCD, low self esteem, and social anxiety. Basically my biggest fear has always been public embarrassment, something that really took off within the past few years. 

I guess I had it good until Monday morning on December 13th of 2021, and more than a month later it’s still stuck in my head. What happened was we were working with our lab groups and I had to sneeze. First sneeze was normal. The second sneeze came out both ways, a sneeze fart. Luckily it wasn’t super loud and didn’t have any smell. My entire group heard it for sure and possibly the one next to us. I was immediately embarrassed, and pretty much just pretended nothing happened. That was it.
The rest of that week I was super paranoid and didn’t talk to everyone, then after Christmas break things felt normal, still very paranoid though, just hoping time would help.

I hate to be that guy but a lot of this is because of a girl. Fuck me right? I have a huge crush on this girl in my grade, I’m kinda obsessed with her, kinda sick of her at this point too. She’s pretty much the only reason I get excited about school even though we’ve never talked to each other. I hate that she’s popular but she’s got the prettiest face ever and a cute personality. I’ve been extremely paranoid that she might know but it’s unlikely. There was one popular guy in my lab group who definitely knew, I don’t why he would even tell anyone about what I did. So here’s what happened today. 

Our school is kinda weird, each grade has a huge circle area where kids hand out between classes. There are benches and usually all the popular kids use them. So me and my friend were standing at the edge of the giant circle talking and she was right there on the bench talking to a friend. We were like the only non popular kids there so we were quite noticeable. I saw them looking right at us and they were defiantly laughing, whenever she’s present I can’t help but look at her, she’s so beautiful. It could’ve been about anything. I’m almost certain they were laughing at him, me, or both of us. My friend is a very outgoing guy, can be pretty loud and crazy at times, and very funny it could’ve been him. We had to wear our class t shirts for a class picture today and mine was super small so I wore it on top of a hoodie, I don’t know it could’ve been that or anything about me. At the time it didn’t seem like such but once I got to class I kept stressing about it, “she knows about it, now I’m fucked.” She’s got a big sense of humor, what if they made a nickname for me or something? Well if she does know I’m much happier with her thinking it’s funny than being gross, I guess. 

Well that’s what sucks about this incident so much, the uncertainty, the paranoia, the thought of everyone thinking I’m weird and gross. I could be completely wrong but I could not be wrong which is totally stressing me out. I don’t want to be known as that weird kid who sneeze farted in class, like how am I supposed to come back from that? No girl is going to want me. I know everything is bigger in your head, has anything like this happens to any of you? I feel awful, I e never hated myself so much before. I think people are gonna forget about it just think whenever people that might know about it see me they’ll be all like, “there’s the kid that did a sneeze fart it class”. I’m just not too sure how to react to this, the uncertainty of this whole situation is driving me insane. I’m generally a pretty paranoid person, for example I’m always looking around in the hallways because I thing people might be looking or laughing at me, negative thoughts rule my head. What’s keeping me together at this point are a few things: it happened nearly a month ago, it’s highly unlikely for it to spread to be worth telling people about, and spreading to so many people, and that time heals all wounds. There could a solid chance that only a small amount of people know about this and didn’t really pass it on, I just don’t see how many people could know about this and if they did would it really be a big deal. Our new semester just started and I feel so paranoid, I feel like everyone knows about it. whenever someone looks at me I get all stressed, I feel like everyone thinks I’m disgusting and avoids me like the plague. I had a talk with my dad about it and he just said I’m just a boy in high school. 

It’s been a whole month of non stop anxiety and paranoia about one “small” event. This sucks and brings me to one thing: suicide.