thirtypercent asked prettyarbitrary:

PA! You’re awesome. People who are both talented and genuinely kind are amazing, and make me feel like this: <3 <3 <3 I admire your “don’t care what other people think” attitude more than I can say. I’m working on it: I make myself do things I never thought I’d have the guts to do, but then get eaten alive by anxiety over everything I said and did. I’m doing that right now in real life and fandom life, and it’s overwhelming. Stupid brains need off switches. (Anything is publishable btw)

It is so overwhelming!  You have to frigging lay SIEGE to that anxiety to chip away at it, and it is so exhausting.  It took me years to get to where I am now.  But every six months or so I would look up and realize that I did indeed feel a little better than the last time I’d checked.

But recovering from anxiety and low self-esteem, these are hard, grueling things to do.  And the nature of the beast means we don’t have the strength to do it every day—and that’s okay.  We’ve got the rest of our lives to work on it.  That self-forgiveness is a major one too.  I built my strength up on that point by trusting my friends’ instincts.  Maybe I didn’t see why I was worthwhile, but they obviously did, and I admired the hell out of them, so I could start from the basis of figuring that they had a point.  And I loved them, and they loved me, ergo if I was brutal to myself I was hurting them, so for their sakes (and in the interests of not being a hypocrite, because I hate when I’m a hypocrite), the right thing to do was to lighten up on myself.  If I wouldn’t be that mean to them, then I shouldn’t be that mean to myself.

A big step came for me when I started…man, how do I put this.  The humiliation that comes with social anxiety and low self-esteem, you try to shove it away, right?  ”No, no, I reject you, I feel nothing.  I know you’re not real.”  But the thing is that while that seems like the rational thing to do, then it doesn’t really go away.  It just lurks in a box, waiting for the lid to flip up so it can come out and assault you again.  I had stuff from when I was FIVE that would still come out and chew on me.

But one day I went, “Fine, humiliation from that stupid thing when I was six, you come at me.”  I sat there and let myself really feel it, didn’t flinch, let it take its best shot.  And it SUCKED.  I felt SO ashamed, and my face felt hot and tight, and I think I kind of wanted to cry and maybe crawl under a stump that was nearby.  I remember sitting there thinking, “Oh god, what a loser I am.”  But two things happened.  First, I realized that I actually felt this EVERY TIME that memory reared up; this wasn’t new or different, I’d been feeling this humiliated over it for years.  And then the second thing that happened was…it passed.  Just like when I get annoyed and then get over it.  I felt crummy for…oh, ten, fifteen minutes?  And then something distracted me, the bad mood lifted and life moved on.

And after that, that memory never held the strength to chew on me the same way again.  I mean, it’s still embarrassing, but it’s not “Oh god, I can’t look at you” embarrassing.  (I wet my pants in class because the teacher was always so snooty about taking bathroom breaks that I tried to hold it—see?  I can even admit it!  I feel dumb, but I was FIVE.)

And so I started confronting my shame more often.  When I’d get one of those shame-binges going on, I’d let myself feel the humiliation and then move on.  And at first it SUUUUUUCKED every time…but only for five or ten minutes, and then I got on with my day, and I felt a little better because I knew I’d just refused to let my emotions run amok over me.  Like, I could FEEL myself healing a little bit every time I did it.  And my first instinct was still (occasionally still is), “NO NO DO NOT LOOK DO NOT FEEL” and I had to deliberately stop myself from blocking it and let it roll over me.  But the more I did it, the easier it was, and the less the embarrassment bothered me, and the better I felt about myself, and the less ammo my brain had to chew on me with.

So these days…well, it’s not like I can’t still embarrass myself.  But I’ve learned how to handle it.  I feel like an ass for a few minutes, apologize if necessary, (fix it if necessary if it’s a real screw-up, but most things aren’t), and generally if somebody else insists on making an issue of it, I’m aware that they’re the ones looking ridiculous.

So, um.  There is a story for you. ^_^  Or a technique.  I don’t know if it will work for other people, but it made a big difference for me.

BUT.  What I meant to say before I went off on that was that fighting through these things is hard, and exhausting, and it can suck, and if you ever need a good rant or comfort or something, I’m totally willing to lend an ear.  I’ve been there myself.