Anxiety

I've always been an anxious person. As a child I remember frequently worrying about whether or not my parents would ever be happy after their divorce. That one lingered for years and now that they're both in solid long term relationships, I don't have to worry. Social anxiety on the other hand has been omnipresent throughout my life. As a little kid I never had more than two or three friends, a trend that continued until I was a teenager. Even then I was the reserved one. I would never start a conversation with a stranger. I've always been terrible at making friends and was lucky enough in my teen years to become friends with two amazing, outgoing, far from socially stunted young women who like me so much that they made the plans, the friends, it was great. When distance came between the three of us, through various uncontrollable life changes, I found myself once again with someone far more socially proficient than I, my boyfriend. Colin was the life of every party. All of our friends called him to see what was going on that day. When we lived together, our house was the epicenter of all things social in our lives. Even after we split up and I moved out, we still remained friends and I still had a constant source of socialization at hand. Then he died. It hit me hard...it still hits me hard. I miss his friendship, I miss his laugh. More than anything we were best friends and though I don't feel that I lost the love of my life, I lost one of my best friends ever.

So Colin is dead. Allie moved to Boston for her undergrad and is now in NYC for her masters. Carly up and left for Austin one day; we still talk and when we do it's like old times, but she's just not here. Then there's Brooke. We fell out of touch after high school; different crowds, her boyfriend hated me, I was too wrapped up in Colin, and of course the personal shit that stays off the blog...My point being that after Colin died my social life collapsed. Part of it was my inability to grieve the way my friends were, the fundamental changes that his death made on my life, but the other half was simply my social anxiety.

After he died I plunged myself into schoolwork. I was working full-time and carrying 15 credit hours. I left myself little time to breathe, let alone grieve with my friends...socialize. And it makes me feel horrible, but with every passing day that I didn't call it just got harder. I felt like an outsider for the first time...Without any of my anchors I just drifted.

For a while I sporadically hung out with my friends on the weekends. Then I moved in with the BF in Lansdale, far to far for a quick drop in, and it became much easier to allow more and more time to lapse...making it harder and harder to pick the phone back up.

Being sick just makes it that much easier to not socialize...if you can't get up the energy to get off the couch; if you've got a mild migraine; if your just plain old depressed, it's easy to just stay home with your sweetheart.

So I graduate in three weeks. I've been done with school now for two months. What do I do with my days? Nada. I laze about. Watch TV. Surf the internet. Am totally unproductive. I have time now to go out, to do things, but I find that I'm depressed, fatigued, and anxious about just leaving the house. I need to get past this. I need a shrink, I think. I've just been out of the social scene for so long that I don't know how to re-establish friendships, to exist outside of school. We've started getting together with a group of friends and playing Dungeons & Dragons on Wednesday nights...it's geeky as all hell, but it's something to do with other people...it's a step in the right direction I guess.

We'll see...