Anti-Social Anxiety

I’m shy.  I’m very shy and self conscious, yet most people who have met me would attest to exactly the opposite.

This is because two things have always insured me against shyness:

1) Hypomania and mania.  Both come packed with undeserved, egocentric confidence and buoyancy, the unshakable belief that you’re fascinating and witty, nervous, rambling, energy, up until the point where mania spikes into dysphoria and you are an aggressive, raging, paranoid bar-brawler.  I say “you”. What I mean, of course, is “I”.

2) Alcohol.  Lots and lots of alcohol.

Now that I’m daily dosed up with antipsychotics and mood stabilisers, mania and hypomania is rare.  It has been some time since I’ve experienced a “typical”, social manic or hypomanic episode.  Now, when they come, they come with depression linking arms, and they double up to make the anti-social agitated depression, or dysphoric mania, depending on how bad it is.  Yeah, I’ll be talkative, but it will paranoid, fractured rambling.  I’ll have energy, but only to scratch and scratch my skin and pace around the room.

So, one of my Shyness Lifejackets has been well and truly punctured.

As for the other, I’m a titular tee-totaller.  As you may have guessed, I wasn’t always a Righteous Non-Inbiber.  I was a Lasher, a Get-Smasheder, in short, I was a complete and utter pisshead. I did my native country proud.

I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed a drink.  I needed a drink.  The cyclical pattern of the manic depressive who relies on alcohol to function socially is this: hypomania or mania makes you feel invincible, capable and above all, drink-under-the-table-able.  You think you can handle more than you really can, so, it’s okay to have the fifth or sixth drink as you’re just having fun and being utterly charming with it.  When you’re manic or hypomanic (I keep saying “you’re” and “you”, but I do mean “I”.  I find it easier to at least sound like I’m not just renting out my psyche to you), excess is natural.  So, if ordinarily you’re a social drinker, you will drink. A recreational drug user, chances are, you’ll wave cheerio to your nasal structure.

Then, of course, there is the flipside.  When you’re depressed, you feel self conscious and unworthy.  You would stay indoors, but you’ve been dragged out, you reason, “This might cheer me up” or there’s a birthday and you’d feel incredibly guilty if you didn’t attend.  And more guilt is the last thing you need.  You get there, to a pub or club or whatever (being that I’m twenty two, it is more “pubs” and “clubs” than whatever) and feel absolutely wretched and almost transparently suicidal.  You accept a drink like it’s a lifeline, and, momentarily, you find yourself easing up.  The tension unknots itself, you giggle a little, and drink more, and more, and more, until you stop laughing, start crying and shuffle home in the probably by now founded belief that everybody thinks you’re a tiresome, maudlin, unstable bore.

Herein lies my problem; my moods are truly rapid cycling, so, to one degree or another, I have always occupied either category a or category b.  Therefore I was a flagrant abuser of alcohol and always came across as extremely loud and extroverted or extremely depressed, even though I am actually a rather shy and introverted.

I had to stop drinking, for many reasons.  The ones I cite most often, being the most socially acceptable of my rationale, is that I simply can’t afford to drink.  This is true.  Alcohol, especially in London, is fantastically expensive.

The other back-up reasons are medical: my medication interacts with alcohol and massively lowers my tolerance to it.  One drink gets me as pissed as three, and obviously feeling more uninhibited means that I drink more…  And that! my friends, is dangerous.

Then there are my personal reasons, and Rob’s reasons.  Rob’s reasons are observable things: alcohol makes any psychosis I am experiencing much worse.  Vicious cycle again because when I am going through bouts of psychosis, one of the first things I usually do is drink to try and drown it out.  That’s frightening for him to witness and finding me in the street pissed and psychotic shouting at the sky isn’t pleasant for him. Alcohol ballses up my moods even more.  If I’m hypomanic, a bout of heavy boozing will kick me higher up, if I am depressed, then further down. It also makes me very impulsive, and that was never pleasant for Rob either, pulling me away from strangers I was propositioning or clearing up blood from self inflicted razor cuts to my face.

The main reason is that I have made an ass out of myself drunk.  And that’s after four years of making an ass out of myself while manic, too.  So the niggling worry that I am a pain in the hole to be around has quite rightly been realised:  I am a pain in the hole to be around, often an utter embarrassment, waking up the next morning struggling through blackouts and then feeling paranoid the next time I see someone.

I became sick of waking up and thinking, “Oh fuck” and spending days and weeks afterwards in a shame spiral.  My “antics”, once funny, became exhausting and laughable, to me, at least.  I was, for a while, that Crazy Irish Girl, but as time wore on, and it became painfully clear that “crazy” was literal, it became sad.  That’s not why you go out with your mates.  You want to talk rubbish and about bands you like and opinions you have and smoke and giggle, not worry about someone, or listen to them sermonising on shit.  It’s okay to support your mates through life stuff, but I feel that after lots of death and mentalism and such, that’s a bit too much, in its relentlessness.  I feel that way about my life.  I remember all the texts and cards I got when I was in hospital and it was so lovely, it made me cry.  But I didn’t snap back to sanity, although I am trying.  There can’t be more crisis’ because it’s draining not only for me but for the people around me.  I want there to just be loveliness and fun and laughing.  It’s been five years of going insane.  Enough already.  And being mental, I felt a bit like I was just taking from people, rather than giving.  I want to give more but until I’m un-anxious-a-fied, well.  I have the stupid habit of systemically pushing people away in defence.

I quit drinking in January after a particularly bad run, and necessarily curbed my sociability as not to tempt me.  Everyone has been so positive about my quitting the booze, but it’s been fraught and killed my social life.  Not because I’m not wanted around (I do go out, sometimes) but because I am so bloody anxious.

I know that’s taking it all rather seriously, and that I should just “relax”…

Which leads me back to shyness.

I am very shy, and suffered from terrible social anxiety in the few years before I became seriously ill.  It was partly related to my problems with body image- I believed, like I often do now, that people would outright laugh at me for looking so ridiculous.  It was also because I was bullied very badly for a long time (not just verbally, extremely, extremely physically, too), so my self-esteem was zero.  Coupled with a burgeoning career in Bad Mental Health, going out and making friends was not easy for me.  Consequently, I made some pretty poor choices of friends who hurt me, and further pissed-up my already rather fragile sense of self worth and trust in people. I was one of those quite mental teenagers (mental in the sense of mental as I am now- I started my career of mentalism at around twelve, and it accelerated rapidly into very full-blown manic depressive illness) who nobody really liked, and those nobodies made it clear that they didn’t really like me.

I’m only twenty two now, so my teenage years are not far behind me.  The situation back then was so bad (as was my health) that it was the catalyst for my hasty exit from my hometown, no goodbyes, no real warning.  Rumours abound- I’m dead, or mad, or dead mad- but I don’t care enough to ever go back and correct anybody.  I do have a sort of mythology there, which my sister often makes fun of me for.

Pains and worries that shyness and anxiety encapsulate are self-fulfilling prophecies.  A lack of alcohol, the awareness that I shouldn’t mention any of my personal problems lest I start rambling and the slightly clipped manner than medication has instilled in me has made sociability a nightmare.  Because I am so nervous, I end up doing all the things I don’t want to: haltingly blurting out a personal problem, then nervously trying to cover up for myself by rambling, then feeling so self conscious that I can’t properly focus on a conversation, then my concentration slips and I lose the thread entirely, so I end up saying something rather odd, which lands like a lead balloon, and then I feel too stupid to contribute again.  I also have very little to talk about, being that my life is pretty much spend most of my day alone, have no money or no job and feeding the cats.  Just idiotic, simple things like a conversation with another human bean has become so stressful to me that I avoid it.    Everyone feels this way to a degree.  My degree is just more steep than some others’.

I do analyse things preposterously.  I should just suck it up and go out and try to gradually get back into the swing of things, because I do really like the people I know, and they make me laugh.  But as time has flown by, my doubts and worries have morphed into real, concrete anxiety, and I find socialising more and more difficult. I started a few months back to have panic attacks again about it.  When I do go out, I cling to a wall and leave early.  Now I am in danger of becoming properly reclusive.  I’m okay with Rob, but that’s it.   I even find it hard to cope with my family, so I am both dreading and looking forward to my birthday, when my older sisters are visiting.  Of course, the pressure is then to organise something, as I’m turning twenty three.  I would truly love to, there is no greater pleasure and joy of spending your birthday with lots of people who you think are great, but the actual sociability of it now petrifies me.

When I have to, I can do it.  I get through it, but worry afterwards.  It’s something I really need to work on before I become a hermit.  You’d think, since I write so openly, that I must be an incredibly forthcoming person in the flesh.  I am with certain people, and in certain states of mind, but writing to me is the ideal form of communication- revisable, patient, nonjudgmental.  And it’s something I do when I’m alone, and I’m alone, a lot.  I mostly speak to my friends via blogs, and I talk about my life on Livejournal, which is friends only, as a way of keeping people up to speed, and as a way for me to spy on people’s lives.  But I delete a lot of what I write there for fear of “exposing myself” or of it seeming that I am asking for help.  I don’t use the phone or usually initiate contact with people- something I’ve been told off for in the past.  To me, though, it’s just intrusive.  I don’t like to bother people.

It’s quite sad, to me.  I do occasionally miss the flushes of hypomania, and the early days in which people knew me, when they thought I was just unique and interesting.  I’m sure I still am.  I’m naturally an extrovert, but also shy with it.  If you get me comfortable, then I am forthcoming, and occasionally funny, and silly, and argumentative.  I am not shy enough to not take the piss, or disagree, or descend on a rambling, nonsensical stream of consciousness.  But the comfort is very elusive now because I am anxious all the time.

It’s one of the things I miss most about Brendan.  He also had alcohol problems, in far, far greater excess to my own (which led me to not inviting him to my last birthday.  I bitterly regret that now, but it’s because he was he was having problems with drinking again, and people would be getting pissed.  The last time I had bought him to a pub, he found it so stressful and upsetting that he left abruptly and cried at home.  It was part out of concern, and part, I guess, selfishness, since I watched my father carry on down Brendan’s path, and it was excruciatingly painful.  I always told him I’d talk to him in any medium- phone, smoke signal, MSN (where we spent hours and hours and hours talking with each other) but not in person when he was drinking heavily, because I felt I’d be facilitating it, when I wanted him to stop.  When he was drinking, though, I did sometimes get him to come round to mine instead so I could keep an eye on him.  He was angry at me, though, and I missed him terribly on my birthday.  I wish I had just not said anything, and made another memory with him).

He suffered from depression.  Like me, he was prone to bouts of silence and sullenness, and also madness and making-a-dick-out-of-yourself-ness.  I was completely comfortable with him, and in many senses, he was my best friend in London, though not the one longest held, nor seen most often (due to the above mentioned depressive silence).  I don’t know if he felt the same about me, though sometimes he said he did, and did refer to me, at least to me, as one of his best friends, though doubtless he was sometimes pissed at me for my attitude to his drinking.

He never judged me, even if he disagreed with me (which was often the most fun of all), and I could tell him anything.  Most people tend to be uncomfortable with Tales of Mentalism, but since he’d been there too, I could regale him with my tales, and it would make him laugh.  He’d be the same with me.  I know the most ridiculous and shocking things about him, some good, some bad.  I loved him dearly, and I think he loved me too, and he was only of the tiny minority of people that I could meet one on one, stone cold sober, and have fun with.  He also had the best sense of humour- he was riotously funny and extraordinarily talented- and liked most of the same things as me.  I looked up to him as a writer, he was incredible.  He was just a wonderful, frustrating, sad, brilliant person to know.   I am still shellshocked by his death, I still only cry when the muddle and jumble I deliberately fill my brain with to avoid things like grief slump for a moment.  I miss him, very much.  I wish I had talked to him more before he died- he went to America for a few weeks, and when he came back, I going through a bad patch, mostly unreachable by any means, and the last I heard from him was a voicemail he left on my phone on the Monday, saying he was around (he worked near to me and lived five stops away) if I wanted to come and meet him, but I was depressed, and asleep, and by the Friday he was gone.

I haven’t really talked about it to anyone save for two of his friends (one who I have lost touch with) and his sisters, but when I do, I feel as though I’m intruding on their grief.  I like to listen but feel guilty if I interrupt with my own feelings.  People always have enough of their own stuff that they’re going through.  But I do feel lonely, a lot, because I don’t know who to talk to. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it.

I need to get over all this, and work on it, so that I can be a Normal Person and go out with my friends, and stop being so analytical and worried.  And maybe make some new friends, too, and go to the supermarket without feeling paranoid.  I need to Get Out There before this gets out of hand and I drop out altogether.

All of this must be very unattractive and intimidating to read. I would like for you to have an image in your head of me being capable and erudite, clinking glasses and reading aloud from Donleavy.   I hope you understand that I’m not attempting to be self-pitying, merely, as always, attempting to articulate another aspect of being mentally interesting.

I’m going to see my friend in Brighton on Saturday.  I haven’t seen him in ages, so hopefully it will be nice.

This has been another post Wildly Varying In Tone®.