I’ve had this anxiety my whole life where I worry about doing things the wrong way.  It’s a completely debilitating mental preoccupation where I’m terrified of failure sometimes to a silly and ridiculous degree.  I actually would skip projects in middle school because I didn’t believe I could do them as well as the other kids, so I just didn’t try.

It impacts all parts of my life, to the point that when I’m approached with a new situation I’m uncertain of I’ll entirely avoid it out of fear of doing it wrong until I can have someone guide me through it or find some tutorial on it or something that explains every single aspect of the task in extreme detail.  It’s not just big things or like performances in front of large crowds, it’s doing things like worrying about picking up and bagging my own green onion.  I seriously overthought it so much I avoided the green onions, then I thought “No, I need a green onion for cooking.”  So I doubled back and just threw one in my hand-basket on top of my cereal to get it over with and in the adrenaline rush I realized that I didn’t bag it and I looked like an idiot so I quietly doubled back and got a bag and put the green onion in.  It wasn’t a fear of people seeing so much as not doing it right the first time.

People look at how badly I react to humiliation/ridicule/punishment and fear it and have always said “you have social anxiety!” But I’m only just realizing that’s incorrect and in fact has been damaging to my progress.  I love other people.  I talk freely with strangers.  I’m very warm and friendly and kind and I go out of my way to help people when I’m confident I can.  I’m funny and I can make people laugh and I love making people smile.  Many people genuinely love me when they get to know me... but I’ve been told my whole life I’m socially anxious because of my other issues, so I started acting more like a socially anxious person.  I started overthinking my social interactions and if I’d be able to “act right” or “have the right body language” — but it comes naturally to me every time I’m talking to people.  I’ve been programmed to think I’m afraid of people to the point that I convince myself I am, but then when I have to deal with a new person?  Very little anxiety.  I fall right into it.

Social anxiety isn’t my issue, this weird “I can’t do anything right” anxiety is.  I’d call it low self esteem but I honestly have a bit of an ego and will stand up for myself if I think I’m being treated unfairly.  I genuinely just have a debilitating fear of doing things wrong and not being good at something and my entire perspective of my life is changing realizing that social anxiety isn’t the root of my problems.