Recent Bout of Social Anxiety

I’ve always been fairly shy I suppose. As I a kid, I typically didn’t like talking to teachers or other adults and got embarrassed very easily. This one time when I was about 10, a teacher approached me in the playground asking to speak with me (I don’t know about what). I told her I needed to go to the toilet, and I literally stayed in the toilet for the entire lunch break just to avoid her. Even in my early twenties, I found it very hard to make small talk with people. When I was living in Japan, I remember one time being on a train with a work colleague I didn’t really knew, and I found it so uncomfortable speaking with him. The whole time we were speaking, I was honestly trying to think of a way to get off the moving train, noting that it was hurtling along the tracks at around 80 km/h. It wasn’t really until I was in my thirties that I finally managed to find a way to somewhat control my anxiety in social situations. But even so, I still don’t like having to make small talk, and deal with bosses and work colleagues and all the rest of it, hence why I work at home.

But just last week, something happened, and along with it came flooding back all my social anxiety. It was so stupid (I’ll tell you what happened soon), but I’ve been anxious ever since. I’ve been intentionally avoiding people for about a week now, and I’m only feeling slightly better.

Anyway, about a week ago, I was walking along the street to go visit my mother in the aged care facility when two idiots in a car drove past me. The passenger leaned out the window and screamed out, “Hey moron!”, and then drove off laughing. I don’t know what happened, but I just lost it. I sprinted after the car running about 400 metres, when I saw up ahead they had gotten stuck in traffic, and here I was fast approaching their car with my camera out. “Moron, hey?”. Their faces turned white, but then I started thinking, “What am I doing? I’ve got young children. I don’t know who these guys are. They might have a knife or a gun or anything!”, and so I sprinted off. Discretion is the better part of valour, right? I was absolutely puffed. I had just sprinted for like 500 metres, but then these guys, of course, drove passed me again screaming out obscenities and threats, so I bolted through a nearby park where they couldn’t follow me, at least not in their vehicle, and made it safely to my mother’s residence.

After that, I felt a bit angry. I thought, “What the hell is wrong with society with people just yelling at people on the street?”. Soon after, I felt exhausted as the adrenaline started to wear off. Actually, it wasn’t this that brought back my social anxiety. It was what happened next. You see, I was here to help my mum make a phone call to her bank to activate one of those physical tokens so that we could access her online banking. You’d think that would easy, right? Wrong! You see, recently we’ve had these cyberattacks in Australia, with hackers stealing millions of people’s personal information, so of course, the banks are being very cautious.

We rang up my mum’s bank and I explained to them that I’d be helping her to activate her token. They said that would be fine, but they needed to speak to her first to verify her identity. She ended up failing the identity check as she couldn’t answer all the account-specific questions. I asked the guy on the phone, “As my mum’s power of attorney, is there nothing I can do?”. The only thing he said I could do was go down to the local branch with the power of attorney documents and sort it out in person. So that’s exactly what I did.

A couple of hours later, I was down at the branch with all my mum’s documents. That was a complete waste of time as well as they needed to speak to my mum in person.

So I ended up leaving the bank absolutely miserable. I mean, I needed access to my mum’s account in order to manage her affairs, like paying for prescriptions and the nursing home and all that. And since then, I’ve been completely overwhelmed by social anxiety. I haven’t been able to speak to people in public. I really don’t know why. I mean, it’s not that the bank people were particularly mean or anything. They were just following protocol. But I just feel completely exhausted even thinking about speaking to people now. It’s always so draining. For work, I’ve had to deal with a couple of students over the last few days, and I’ve had nothing but feelings of dread. Hopefully, I get over it soon. Not to mention that my knee still hurts after running after those wannabe gangbangers.

As I said, this one thing – dealing with my mother’s bank – really sent me into a downward spiral. It probably wasn’t the bank per se, but it certainly was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

MUSIC
Melancholia by Godmode