I’ve mentioned before how my social anxiety vanishes when I have a role to play.

Hence the seeming paradox of my being a person with crippling social anxiety who excels at customer service.

My classic example was when I worked for my uncle at the family TV and stereo shop, C.J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service.

I can hear myself answering the phone at work by saying that as I type it. Took me some time to get to where I could say it all in one breath.

Anyhow, I was a clerk/cashier there on weekends and during the Xmas rush, and I never suffered from social anxiety while I was there because I knew exactly what was expected of me.

I rang up people’s purchases, which mostly consisted of filling out rental contracts and taking payment for our rental items – movies and video games.

And yes, that meant filling them out by hand, pressing firmly to make sure the carbon paper made three copies.

We could have been computerized by then, but there was no profit in it.

Anyhow, back to roles. I was nervous there – kind of hard not to be with Uncle Sonny’s grumpy presence upstairs.

I got used to it eventually. He rarely ever actually got mad at me. And I soon learned that he was like that all the time, with everybody, not pissed off at me in particular.

But I wasn’t anxious. For the most part, I loved my job. I loved having a job. I finally felt like I had some sort of role in society and while I was far from supporting myself, at least I was demonstrating that I had economic value in that day’s economy.

I sure miss that.

And I was very good at it. I liked the customers and they liked me. When I was on the job, I was friendly, helpful, understanding, mildly funny (I am way funnier now), and in general a pleasant fellow to deal with.

Yet when I went to lunch, I was that same socially anxious person I always was.

I hate to say it, but the difference was that at work I didn’t have to be myself. I had a role and that made all the difference. The no man’s land between me and random people was eliminated and so was my feeling that I am not giving people the emotional responses they are looking for even though I really want to.

The glib and obvious (but flawed) lesson to take from that is that I should just make up a role for me to play in normal life. Problem solved, right?

No. Because that doesn’t solve anything. Which role? How would I know in advance? There’s so many options! And so forth and so on.

That’s why I am so much more comfortable being Fruvous. He’s a role I invented and perfected for myself over many years and he only exists in a milieu (Tapestries MUCK) where I feel completely at ease, so most of my issues don’t exist there.

And I have pondered trying to be “Fruvous in real life” many times, and he continues to be the person I’d rather be, but his life is a hell of a lot simpler than man.

Plus he’s cuter than the leading brand of fuck whereas in real life, I’m a lummox.

Nothing really wrong with that. There’s a lot of big Bubba shaped motherfuckers in the world who look more or less like me.

But a solid majority of people don’t fuck fat guys and that’s rough when only ten percent of the male population is even into dudes.

But that’s just excuse-making. Truth is, if I got out into the gay social world I could probably find someone with whom I am compatible.

Yeah. If. (sigh)

More after the break.

---

To do or not to do

So a couple of weeks ago, I went against my best judgement and dedicated a section of my ever-present notes file to be a to-do list of things I need to get done.

That’s what they’re for. Hence the name.

I then filled it up with six or seven things I knew I needed to do in the near future, thought, “Phew, that’s a load off my mind! Now I don’t have to keep all these things straight in my head any more!”, and saved the file.

And then immediately began actively avoiding doing any of those things.

And that’s how it’s been since then. And I hate that I am like this. I want to be the sort of person who can construct a sensible plan of action, commit to it. then execute it.

But no. Somehow, the act of writing down the things I want to do in list form transformed them into… I don’t know, an obligation? A commitment? A trap? I have no idea.

But it turned them into something I instinctively avoid. In fact, I a m fairly certain that if I had not written them down, I would have done some of them by now.

Which is, of course, totally nuts.

But then again, so am I.

It has to somehow connect to how I can’t write an outline or anything else extraneous before I write the main thing. If I do, I lose all desire to actually write the thing.

The genie only comes out of the bottle once. So there is no use wishing for a plan.

I write by the seat of my pants or not at all.

It must be the same with the urge to do various tasks in my life. Once I put them in my to-do list, they become yesterday’s news and I never want to see them again so I start ducking every single one of them,

And it’s driving me ducking nuts.

I sometimes feel like I am my own impossible client. Like I am my own agent and my own brilliant but volatile and unpredictable artiste of a client and I am stuck trying to figure out how to work with myself when nothing sensible or logical works.

Clearly, I have to throw away the rulebook and start over from scratch.

So what’s it going to take, me, to get productive effort out of me?

I am open to suggestions.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.