You’ve Become Some Paranoia

We have all had our fair share of feeling like we’re going it alone. Despite not truly being alone we can sometimes cut ourselves off from everyone else when we are going through something difficult.

All through elementary school I was the kind of person who danced to the beat of their own drum. I talked to anyone and everyone (unless it was a stranger), and I made up stories of pirates and treasures that I could only imagine, I was whoever I wanted to be. It stayed that way for pretty much the entirety of middle school too, with me just feeling apprehension when it came to speaking or presenting in front of my class. I was still friends with nearly everyone and still loved telling stories. In the later years of middle school, I started to feel self-conscious and talked to fewer people, my story times stopped, and asking my teachers for help if I didn’t understand what we were doing, stopped. I distanced myself and didn’t talk to the so-called popular kids that I was friends with because “What if they thought I was annoying?” or maybe I was “Too weird.” I started to hate who I was becoming because I could no longer be open about who I really was in front of other people without feeling paranoid that they were judging me. I was feeling like the gravity of a black hole was pulling me in and I couldn’t escape, couldn’t escape myself. It only got worse from there. Getting to high school I felt completely closed off from everyone. I had no friends that I hadn’t pushed away and I was completely alone.

A part of high school was doing group projects which made me feel dumb because I wasn’t able to voice my opinions without feeling judged and it felt like no one ever really wanted to be grouped with me, maybe because I pushed them all away. Group projects weren’t even the worst of it, presentations where I was truly alone caused my anxiety to spike and it would feel like I was dying. I got to my sophomore year and we had to do a speech in front of the class. I had my first panic attack in front of everyone. I never wanted to go back to school. I thought that my classmates would be thinking that I was so weird and that it was sad that I couldn’t even make it through the first sentence of my speech. I was asked to present this one speech four different times, each one resulted in a panic attack. The next time I was asked to present was the first semester of senior year and we had to recite from memory a poem of our choosing. Just the thought of standing at the front of the class caused me to breathe heavier and start to shake but hearing that we had to memorize the poem made me tear up. I couldn’t stand at the head of the room with everybody’s attention on me and recite a poem from memory, so I didn’t. I felt like such a failure. I watched one by one as people recited their poems and did so well, feeling like I was the only one that couldn’t do it. The anxiety that I deal with (not really) has made me feel less than every one of my peers and I have felt so alone because of it. Realizing now that the people I have made friends with also struggle with anxiety has made it feel a little less all-consuming and like maybe I’m not going through all of this alone. I have people that understand what it feels like to think you are going to stop breathing if put on the spot and even though I hate that people I care about go through this, knowing the kind of pain it has caused me, I like not having to keep it all to myself. I like having someone there.

“Person Walking Alone on Beach” by Image Catalog is marked with CC0 1.0.