I’ve tried everything that I’m supposed to do. I’ve had a month long back and forth email conversation with Samaritans, tried to distract myself, talked to my family. A few months ago I went to the hospital of my own accord and told them I felt like I was in danger of killing myself and they spoke to me for a while and sent the crisis team round afterwards. None of this has changed anything in the long run. The problems are still there and they are deep lying and in some cases insurmountable.
The time has come when I can’t stop thinking to myself “Why bother?” I don’t think the pain is worth enduring any more. Life is no fun at all for me, I get no enjoyment from anything and I see no future worth looking forward to. Everything from now onwards will be a downward spiral of misery, loneliness and ever-increasing mockery and disgust from others.
What reasons do I have to carry on? I can’t think of any particularly good ones. Sparing my mum the grief is all I can think of that is stopping me right now but I don’t know how much longer that will keep my alive. Is saving her that pain worth keeping myself miserable and utterly despondent for however long she has to live? I don’t know, maybe for once in my life I will be selfish. I have no friends to leave behind, my funeral will be an empty place. Whenever you hear about a young persons untimely death on TV, people always say “He was so full of life and always laughing, everyone loved him”. If anyone was asked about me they’d probably think “He was so withdrawn and sullen, I was in his class for 10 years and he never said a word” before lying with a similar cliched load of rubbish. I can’t say anyone’d be surprised, I’ve always been “that guy” wherever I’ve studied, lived or worked.
I’m getting tired of thinking about the future. It’s a black hole of pathetic loneliness for me. I don’t want to rot away in some single bedroom flat, holing myself up in there day after day like I have done for the past 20 odd years. There are people on the social anxiety forums who are in their mid thirties and forties who are in that position, some of them still living with their parents and I can foresee exactly that same thing happening to me. I can’t live that life, I won’t let the people who laughed and tortured me have their theories proven right. I’ll take eternal nothingness over that.
The jealousy I experience every day is getting too much. When I went to the arboretum in my home town, there were lots of people around my age there sitting together in groups and just chatting or reading. It makes me want to cry because I’d love so much to be able to do such simple (and probably mundane to most) things. Instead I walked alone, trying to avoid looking like a drug dealer or homeless crazy person. Being an outcast is intolerably painful because there’s no end to it. The only solace I ever got was becoming a hermit and never seeing anyone or what I was missing out on. I can’t take that any more though, that was the cause of my first suicidal break down. I think it was 18 months with no human contact other than my parents and sister.
What triggered my break down was seeing a documentary about older virgins and a guy who decided at 23 (now younger than I am) to pay an escort to have sex with him. I realised how pathetic and what a monster people think of such losers like him. He was a joke, the whole point of the program seemed designed to mock and make a spectacle of these weirdos who were so undesirable they had to pay someone to like them. I’m not proud of this but after about a decade since puberty and having no experience whatsoever (I don’t think I even started a conversation with a girl when I was in secondary school, I can’t remember ever doing it anyway) kind of gets to you.. I considered doing the same thing briefly. The more I thought about it, the worse idea it became of course. Beyond the moral ramifications, I realised that even a woman who was being paid would probably refuse to come within 2 feet of me.
I don’t want this post to make me sound like some kind of sex crazed maniac, I’m far from it. I think humans have a need to express affection and love though. I need which I have never and will never get to fulfill. I’m far, far to messed up in the head and monstrously ugly to ever know what it’s like to hold another person close, despite how much I crave it. The agonising pain of seeing every girl I have ever liked go off with someone else, never realising I existed will always be there. I have no redeeming qualities and it would be delusional to think otherwise.
It’s been a long time now and I’ve given a lot of thought to it. It’s not a rash decision, I think tonight may be the night. I don’t feel like crying, just numb. I have the pills, I just need time alone.
to me as well as pretty much everyone else in the know about SA has, I thought I’d give it another read through. Now, one of the key things in there is about how you develop distorted beliefs about yourself and working out how to look at things in a different way. This is where it breaks down for me though, I appreciate the author is good at explaining what happens to socially anxious people in certain situations and identifies a lot of the thought processes that lead to these reactions but her methods of dealing with them aren’t really that great in my opinion. They might be ok if you only have a mild case of SA, or if you really aren’t ugly/clumsy/boring or whatever you think about yourself. They say you should look up what evidence there is to support your beliefs, in the hope that you won’t find any and that will allow you to challenge them. Well I decided to do a little exercise from the book and see what evidence there is for my negative beliefs about myself.
The Social Phobic 