hello a1soad
thank you for sharing your story. it takes a lot of courage to post.
from your description, the symptoms sound very much like social anxiety.
you mentioned many characteristics common to sufferers of social anxiety. i used to believe that i was the only person in the world who thought and behaved the way i did. when i discovered that others went through the same things and it was called social anxiety, it was a shock.
the thinking you describe and the mental beating yourself up is an integral part of social anxiety. the most widely-recognised therapy programs for it involve attacking those irrational thought patterns.
with social anxiety, you are a harsh and severe critic of yourself and you torture yourself in a way that you'd never do to others. the rational thinking that you apply to others, and the compassion you apply to others is the opposite of the way you treat yourself.
you mentioned moments that follow you all day following interactions and your perceived failures within them. what those thoughts do is entrench themselves deeply and 'failures' become bigger than they really are and provide 'proof' for your thoughts. irrational logic and negative thinking have a fertile breeding ground in the socially anxious person. it's a vicious circle. every perceived 'failure' and negative thought makes it harder to put yourself in the situations where those 'failures' potentially take place and so avoidance strategies become our defence for that. isolating yourself away is your way of avoiding the 'failures', but your negative and irrational thoughts don't go away. they remain fully-functional, always ready to tell you terrible things about yourself and to remind yourself that you are a 'failure'. your avoidance strategies become further evidence of your 'failure'. the immediate benefits of avoidance outweigh the terror, anxiety and negative thinking of facing the situation, so we choose them.
the friendships you established on EverQuest must have been so comforting and wonderful for you. they offered you friendship in a medium where your social anxiety could take a backseat. you didn't have to be yourself. you didn't have to contend with your speaking voice or your physical self and the physical symptoms of social anxiety, allowing you comparative freedom, greater confidence and a chance to engage in communication with others despite the negative things you perceive about yourself. these online friendships can also provide our negative thinking with further fuel with which to mentally beat ourselves up, and they can provide us with another avoidance strategy while also giving us a chance at human contact.
the drugs and alcohol were probably another effort to escape from yourself. self-medication. depression is a frequent companion to social anxiety. many people who suffer from one mental illness are prone to suffer from others. considering the impact of social anxiety it's hardly surprising to think that depression co-exists.
your parents were probably ill-equipped to offer much advice. they may or may not have been trying to be helpful, or at least hopeful that their simplistic explanations might make it all go away.
you talked about the tape recorder in your brain. that is such a typical part of social anxiety. the other thing that's typical is the negative self-talk - telling yourself it was 'stupid' or whatever. you'd never think that of others, or at least to the degree you think of yourself. that is a good indicator that your thinking is irrational and you are being overly cruel to yourself. in 2001, circumstances took place which brought me to (aborted) therapy with a psychologist. one piece of homework she asked me to do was to come up with 3 positive things about myself to share with her at my next appointment. i was paralysed with anxiety about being asked to do that, and i remember even asking her if i could make them up (she said no, that would defeat the point of the exercise). i drove home in tears and spent two hours that night telling myself out loud all the things i hate about myself while i cried and cried until exhaustion took over. i cancelled appointments for the next four weeks to avoid the homework task. therapy ended for me soon after that and i never did have to share the non-existant list of positive things.
do you regard your inability to talk to family members as being freakish? i did. i thought i was the only person in the world who was paralysed with fear and shyness about having to talk with family members. when i discovered that it was a reasonably common characteristic of social anxiety, i was utterly shocked. in my family, the only two people i can talk to without being completely tongue-tied and fearful are my mother and one of my sisters (although that is becoming increasingly difficult as the years and circumstances, including her own family commitments and the chasm of normality that separates us, affect my ability to communicate with her). my mother has been chronically ill all my life, and has deteriorated rapidly in the last little while. i'm terrified of what will happen when my mother and my dog (who is now 14 years old) are no longer alive.
i can also relate to your comment about not feeling like you're 'all there'. for the most part, i feel separate and apart.
i want to thank you for sharing your story, and i hope you can find a way to release yourself from the shackled future that this illness might cause you. i hope you find a way to overcome it or at least deal with it, be it through therapy, medication, personal strength and strategies or something else.
take care. i hope you post again. and i hope someone else might answer your post. i see lots of people have viewed it, and no doubt they are nodding quietly about the things you wrote.
