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Hello, I have Social Anxiety

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,471 words

No dev blog this week since I haven't worked on Atonal Dreams, so here's a ramble about my various mental issues! What fun!!

I've taken this week off Atonal Dreams development largely because my mum and step-dad - who are twice my age and have way more of a social life because of how extroverted he is - very wisely decided to go on holiday with another couple during this global pandemic, meaning I've been home alone this week. So I thought I'd have a bit of a holiday of my own.

It's freeing... but sad that I'm 32 and still living like a teenager, only feeling like I have freedom when my parents are away. It's not like I even interact with them for more than maybe five minutes a day when they're here, but I feel like I'm trapped in my room because leaving it likely invites awkward smalltalk, which means chances to say something stupid that my demons will beat me up about. Especially annoying since my step-dad's aforementioned gregariousness means there's often some strangers he knows hanging around, and I feel awkward about the thought of being this live-at-home weirdo adult son walking in on them in my pyjamas and dressing gown and making them uncomfortable due to the oddness of it all. ("But then why don't you change out of your pyjamas?!?"... would be missing the point.)

I wish I lived alone or with friends or a partner around my age, but I can't afford it, so I'm stuck here for now. Frustrating.

I have this 'freedom' this week, but it's not as if I've been doing much different to usual other than going downstairs for about an hour a day for a change of scenery while I play Undertale. I've been writing my impressions of that in great detail, so I'll post them when I've finished. Feels like I'm getting near the end, though I'm unsure.

I am constantly paranoid though that someone will burgle the place and I'll be responsible for it, which is unlikely, or that one of my step-dad's many friends will try to come in looking for him, which is less unlikely since that happens randomly all the time anyway. The doors are locked, but I don't know if any of them have keys or anything. Or maybe they'd just knock at the door and call out and I'd either have to awkwardly answer or pretend I didn't hear it and have the awkwardness of that hanging over me for days.

Mostly I try to ignore the paranoia, but a couple of nights ago I was woken up by what seemed like some cluttering sounds downstairs at 3am, followed by an extremely clear posh, male voice saying my name in an investigative tone. I've mentioned it on Twitter and I texted my mum about it moments after it happened to calm myself and just in case it was something they might have an explanation for ("oh, we told [whoever] they could come in during the night but forgot to tell you!"), and it seems the default response to this is to assume I'm a moron who can't tell the difference between the sound of a cat and my name, or a dream and a spoken voice...

I'm no stranger to odd psychological experiences, deliberately-elicited or otherwise, and this was remarkable because it was so different to what I've experienced before. It didn't feel like a lucid dream or sleep paralysis. The voice had a clearly searching tone, like "are you here?", I could identify the approximate age and sex, and it had a distinct accent different from my own. It asked for "Toby?" rather than "Tobias?" or "hello?", which only really my parents (and some commenters sometimes for some reason) call me these days, with an "o" sound completely different to the one I use (it's pointless to try to communicate that in text, even using the IPA (which the formatting likely won't permit anyway), but I'd write my Northern English pronunciation as "Tohby" and the one I heard as "Tewby").

People also assumed I was scared or worried by it, but I was more curious about the psychology of it, since it was obviously produced by my own mind (or at least I could deduce that from checking downstairs and finding nothing out of the ordinary). I'm fascinated by hallucinations, but I've never been 'lucky' enough to have one before, so I always wondered how real they seemed. Can people who hallucinate giant spiders sitting in their room tell that they're different to the other objects in the room, or are they indistinguishable from if they were real? Can people who hear voices tell the difference between those voices, their own inner voice, and other people's voices? When we think thoughts, we feel a sense of agency behind them, as if we created them, but is this missing for hallucinated voices? Sounds like it from what I've read.

This voice seemed real and like it came from outside my head; it sounded like it came from downstairs. It was very different to the usual voice in my head - or any I'd normally imagine - and, interestingly, it created a strong physiological panic response - an adrenaline surge - which doesn't ever happen with anything my demons mutter to me in my waking or dreaming worlds.

I find it fascinating how the brain can startle itself like that! Makes me think about a ton of stuff I read during my psychology course about the makeup of the mind, about dissociative identity disorder (which I'm not entirely convinced is a real thing), schizophrenia, etc, and how minds might potentially be made up of distinct "modules" that can develop into full personalities independent of the rest. It's all very odd, and something I wish I could talk about in more detail, but I wouldn't want to from half-remembered memories and I can't be bothered doing any new research at the moment.

The brain's two hemispheres could even be seen as housing separate minds, too. I talked years ago when I was worried about the brain surgery I needed leaving me with a 'split brain' about experiments with patients who did have the connection between their hemispheres severed, which showed that the nonverbal half could make decisions which the verbal, conscious mind wasn't aware of, but which it'd try to explain - confabulate - as if it was the one who made the decision based on information available to it (which wasn't the case).

Minds are weird.



Anyway, have you ever bought groceries online before? I haven't! Or rather I hadn't, but I did recently, because the nearest supermarket is miles away and I thought I'd use this opportunity to see how it all works. I chose a delivery slot today between 3 and 4pm, and it's 2:50pm now. A truck with the supermarket's logo showed up about ten minutes ago... but I've yet to hear anyone coming to the door or anything. And it's still there. Maybe they arrive early and just sit around in the truck waiting until the slot time? Weird. Also annoying since it's just making my anxiety build, and that won't stop until I've actually gone through the gruelling ordeal of saying "do I have to sign anything?" and/or "thanks", which I might not have to anyway, and maybe they'll just put the food in the porch so I don't have to answer the door at all. I don't know! Social anxiety!! Pfff, I chose this option partly because it seemed less social-anxiety-inducing that going on the bus (which I've done many times over the past few years, but it's been a while, and last time I embarrassed myself by trying to pay with money that was apparently expired due to some overhaul of the currency I wasn't aware of, and UGH).

I am such an absolute pro at living in this world. Obviously.

(At least I can entertain myself and calm my nerves by writing about it. I SUPPOSE. Is that someone at the door?? No? Yes?!? No?!?! There are definitely sounds... I think it's the neighbours though. Probably?!)

...Finally! I just went through an interaction exactly as cringeworthy as I expected it to be, which always happens, so now I can 'enjoy' the relief of not having to dread it and the absolute joy of having little critical memories of my bumblingness come up again and again even though the delivery guy will likely have forgotten about me already since he's surely dealt with so much worse.

Here's what happened during this extremely exciting episode which is totally worthy of the anxiety it causes to electrify my broken brain:

This house has a front door, and a porch thing (or technically I think it's a ∞ vestibule ∞?), then another glass door, meaning that I could lock the glass door while leaving the front door unlocked without any risk of anyone actually getting into the house (I mean a burglar could just smash the glass door, but I doubt a burglar's going to be trying to come in through the front door anyway). So I wrote on the instructions for the delivery 'leave in porch if possible', hoping they'd open the front door, leave them there, then go.

And that's exactly what would have happened! But instead I went down to the glass door, and tried to talk to the (young) delivery guy through it, saying "do I need to sign?", since he had one of those... signing gadget things... in his hand, and that - for whatever reason - was the line I'd 'rehearsed' in my mind earlier. He said "wha?", clearly unable to hear me, and looked at his gadget as if he'd heard that I DID need to sign, and I tried repeating myself, more confusion, so I said something like "is it a corona risk if I open this door?" (he wasn't wearing a mask, neither was I because why would I be in my own house), to which he obviously wasn't hearing what I was saying (I could hear him!), so I opened the door and said "what I SAID was 'do I need to sign?'", and he said no, he just needed to check that I was home, and I said - laughing hopefully amicably rather than insanely - okay, I've never done this before, which I'll now be thinking about the wording of for ages because what does that mean? That I've never talked to another person before?!? That's what it sounded like!! Not just grammatically but because I am clearly incredibly awkward!!!!

...I can't really communicate tone very accurately there, so maybe it comes across as beating myself up or being negatively worked up or something. Mostly I'm just amused, rolling my eyes, because of how ridiculous it is to pick apart these things, as if many brief interactions between strangers aren't awkward in some way or another. Though I am aware I'm not exactly graceful at it because I do it so infrequently.

Also, my diet is awful, the kind of stuff a student might get since I haven't bothered to rethink things since I was one of those (and half the stuff I'd bought was chocolate because why not), so usually I prefer to use the self-checkout things or whatever they're called in supermarkets to avoid the scathing judgements of cashiers, but this guy had to carry all my unhealthy choices to the door and put them in the porch by hand. They weren't in a box or bag or anything, they were just laid on the floor (I think he brought them from the truck in a box, but took them out of that). Again, surely he's seen way worse, but I'm still at least a bit embarrassed!

Reddit threads are useful for putting things like this into perspective. I recently saw one about someone with social anxiety worrying - as I once did - about the exact words to say while buying something from a shop. Some replies were the kind of obnoxiously oblivious ones I remember getting when I was younger and worried about those things ("just go to the counter and pay for it, it's not a big deal"; basically ∞ this subreddit ∞). Others, though, were from people who worked in customer service, who talked about how they dealt with so many people that they literally forgot about even eccentric individuals as soon as they were out of their sight.

Still, it's not so much whether or not other people remember the social anxiety sufferer's failures, but it's more about how their demons do remember, and use those 'mistakes' to remind the poor person of their general incompetence at life. So it's not entirely comforting to know that minds I'll never have access to anyway don't retain a constant judging slideshow of my totally-catastrophic failures like mine does, because, well, mine does.

I also remember a reddit thread about people doing the exact job this supermarket delivery guy was; I think it was something like "what was the weirdest person you've ever delivered to?". I remember a story about something like an extremely morbidly obese man who ordered like 10 pizzas, and opened his door a crack to silently snatch them, but even that crack allowed the delivery person to smell an odour so repulsive it could peel paint, and to get a look at a room so filthy it could be a literal rubbish tip. Makes me wonder about the kind of squalor some people live in... though I suppose I have first-hand experience of that growing up. Hmm.

Anyway. I'm rambling about this far more than I need to. Writing about it does seem to help though. It's one of the reasons I wished I lived with friends, so then I could vent out about my mistakes to them and find catharsis by doing so... though I suppose few - if any - people would be able to tolerate someone like that in the long run, so at least I have a blog???

Next week, I'll need to research answers to the questions I wrote about in the most recent promotion category post!!! Yes! Because I make games apparently!! Right!!!!

(I've done a ton of creative stuff this past week, but it's all been private, not for others' judging eyes, like I've talked about before. So while I'm glad I've done it, and I probably developed skills and relieved some stress on my mental health in the process, I do feel bad since it's not getting me closer to having my next game out.)



Here's a question: have you ever had hallucinations??