I have been thinking a lot about persona lately. I think I have some ideas about what factors have been keeping me from finishing my personality development and overcoming social anxiety :

• 1) Social isolation. Duh.
• 2) My insistence on total honesty and/or authenticity. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to turn into a facile liar or anything, but I think that I would be best served learning to allow myself to be socially defined and confined a little bit. That could go a long way towards diminishing that deep sense of vulnerability that is the fundamental basis for social anxiety. Feeling less vulnerable means feeling more safe, and feeling more safe means less anxiety, and less anxiety means better decisions. Which leads to my next obstacle :
• 3) Trying to never make mistakes. Another of the foundations of social anxiety is a severe over-response to awkward moments. The socially anxious react to minor moments of awkwardness and disconnection as if they are enormous errors of life-wrecking trauma, and this robs them of their ability to handle the situation in the normal and adaptive way. Healthy people can shrug those moments off because they know they are not the end of the world. In fact, they know that such things are inevitable and that they happen to everyone.

  Thus, they can put these moments in their proper perspective. The socially anxious, on the other hand, because their perspective is so out of whack, can only react to them in the maladaptive way, which is to try to make sure they never, ever, ever happen again…. which, of course, leads to even further anxiety and even poorer decisions.

  The only hope is to get a grip on oneself and, with positive self-talk, bend oneself towards not just knowing that these reactions are insane and don’t line up with reality, but believing it.

• 4) A deep down sense of shame. Turns out you do not need religion to end up with one of those. You just need poisonously low self-esteem. Self-esteem so low that it approaches the theoretical minimum, where there is absolutely no negative statement about you that you will not believe. I spent a long long time thinking I was a toxic level of horrible, unwanted and unlovable, a burden to all who knew him and repulsive to all who might meet him. I felt like the world would be better off without me and that nobody would really mourn my passing. It would be more of a relief than a loss to people.

  And so forth and so on.

  But now I know that I am actually a heckuva guy.

  And every day, I get a little better at believing it, too.

• 5) Lack of role models. Looking back over my life, I realize that there weren’t a lot of fully socially complete people for me to learn from. My parents didn’t have friends. My siblings had friends but they did most of their socializing away from home. When I had friends, I was too socially freaked out around them to be able to learn from them.

  So what role models I had did not do me much good.

• 6) The wrong environment. During my most recent therapy appointment, my therapist asked me if there was another time when I had felt as alive and reborn as I do now. And the only time I could think of was my first time going to college. There, I had friends, I had classes, I was discovering the joys of philosophy, I lived with my brother, and overall I was a pretty happy dude.

  It was the right environment. I wouldn’t find that good an environment again until I met up with my current set of friends around a decade ago. And even that was not really the same, not because there’s anything wrong with Joe. Julian, and Felicity, but because it lacked the challenge of classes and university life.

  So it’s no wonder that I couldn’t get my life back on track until I went back to school. University was where I left off, and it’s where I picked back up again, more than twenty years later.

And I am sure there are many more. After all, I’m a deep and complicated guy, and therefore simple solutions don’t suit me.

I have also been struggling with that whole ego thing I keep talking about. The problem, in a nutshell, is : how does one develop an ego proportionate to one’s abilities when those abilities are, to be frank, quite extraordinary? Without going completely insane with delusions of grandeur and/or megalomania?

Surprisingly, the solution appears to be getting some actual, tangible ego boost. Like getting accepted at VFS, for instance. Now that there is something solid to support my ego, I have an anchor for my ego, and I no longer feel like I am going to go crazy if I try to actually develop an ego because now, my abilities are somewhat defined. So I can go to VFS feeling more secure than I have in a very long time because just by getting accepted, I am getting the validation I have needed for so long but were too ill to collect.

Monday could not come soon enough for me. I am actually a little disappointed that on the first day, we’re just going to be doing a sort of “getting to know each other” thing and not getting into actual classes. I wanna work, goddamn it. Give me homework! Assign me assignments! Make me learn stuff! DO IT NOW!

I’m so weird.

I’ve just reached the point in my life when I can fully understand that work and effort aren’t the enemy, they’re salvation. Like my therapist said, maybe all I have really been missing is challenge. I have never had it. I wasn’t challenged by school, and I was smarter than all my teachers. And because I was so socially isolated, life didn’t challenge me either.

Now I face a real challenge, a crazy intense year of education that will push me to my limits.

And all I can say to that is, “Finally!”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.