The Quiet Person

I posted this to my Facebook page last night and felt like I should share it here as well. I wish I could just look at my co-workers and tell them what I wrote last night. That while you are all laughing and having a great time, I am struggling to even keep up with the conversation. Instead, I just sit there with a stupid grin on my face to hide my anxiety of being in a social situation.

I have good friends but only a few. That's okay with me because it is much easier to have conversations with them one on one. I hope my kids can deal with their social anxieties better than I have. I hope I am strong enough to show them that it's okay to be different. I hope that they grow into successful functioning adults.

I've been sitting here this morning reading the news. I still can't read or hear about the Newtown, CT tragedy without crying. I can't watch my kids sleep without completely losing it. My heart is so broken for these people, for the state of this country, and even seeing a police presence at my children's school. I am glad to see they are being cautious. Are they going to continue to patrol our schools in our school district once all the newness of this tragedy wears off? or Are we going to go back to a humdrum life and once again just let Mom's like me drop her son off at the Headstart/Preschool class without signing in and getting a visitor's badge? The school secretaries in the past have always just shooed my on with annoyance!

Here is the FB post:

A guy I went to school with posted this on his FB page and I totally get what he is saying. I was a sociable kid and had friends but I was dying inside with anxiety so bad that some days I would go home just sobbing hysterically. None of my close friends ever knew this. Some will find it hard to believe that the girl with the big mouth felt this way inside. I still have issues as an adult with social situations. I am socially awkward. For example, tonight at my work's Christmas dinner I sat there pretending to follow the conversation but I was lost and even said things that didn't follow along with the conversation. After that point, I sat there in silence and once again lonely and miserable. It hurts sometimes when I can't get what I want to say to come out the right way. So, I write. Writing is the only outlet that saves me. I think back to the old days and even now as an adult, it is therapeutic. Read below:

Addendum to the school shooting thing: while mental health is the main driving factor behind things like this, there's one potential underlying cause that I doubt most people realize. That cause is that, while there is training and help available starting early on for most subjects, there is none, ever, for how to interact socially with other human beings in an acceptable manner. For some people - hi, I'm one of them - that is the single most frustrating, complex, arcane, incomprehensible thing on the face of the planet, bar none. Calculus IV is cake compared to holding a simple conversation with someone we do not know. It took years - well past my teens - to pick up the ability to converse with people, and most of you can attest I'm still not exactly gangbusters at it. It's seriously draining, and incredibly freaking hard. Talking, for me, is like a 5-dimensional chess match where I'm blindfolded and using only pawns while the other person has only queens and gets five moves to my one.

Most of you don't think that. Most of you had a knack for this sort of thing, and/or picked it up very early on in life, and at some point decided there was just something wrong with those of us who didn't take to it very quickly. We tended to be laughed at, picked on, and so forth any time we bothered to attempt to communicate, and so we stopped trying and started working on being left alone and ignored, driving people away if we felt we had to. None of that would have been necessary if there had been somewhere to pick up on some social skills without being ridiculed for not simply having them at the level everyone else did.

There is currently one place where this sort of thing can be trained, and that is via therapists - non-judgmental listeners who can point out where we go wrong in conversations and how we can correct it. Of course, that carries a stigma, and isn't readily available. Math tutors? Sure. History? English? Not a problem. Dealing with others? Nope, just label that kid a weirdo and shove them in the corner, or call them a late bloomer or some other BS.

You want fewer people who snap and want to kill everyone in the world? Give the social misfits a bit of a boost. You might start cutting off some of these neuroses and complexes before they get started.