‘it’s alright once you’re in’ - freedom from 2021 social anxiety (even for an extrovert!) Grace Burney
M
e? social anxiety? surely not!
If you know me, you’ll know I love people. Mainly I love talking with – or at – them. Last Trinity term, no word of a lie, I probably went for 15476849 covid walks with 14745748530 people. People are great. But sometimes people scare me. I think it was due to being stuck in my room at home for so long, with few responsibilities other than: sit behind a Zoom screen, eat, go for a walk, watch some Netflix, try not to go crazy (my family didn’t help with this one). Oh, and a law degree, but we don’t talk about that. Now all of a sudden I have to meet new people? Go to parties where there’s 100 people and I only know 1 person? That used to be my dream; now it feels slightly more like a nightmare. But, do you know what? That’s not just because I’ll have to make small talk face to face. It’s because I’m worried they won’t like me. Or I won’t fit in. So I realised there actually WAS something I could do about it: stop feeling pressure. Let it go. Just be yourself. Remind yourself that God loves you unconditionally, and so do your loved ones. Just smile and wave – I promise it won’t be as bad as your brain tells you beforehand it will be. It’s not just transitioning post-plague that makes this a bit tricky, it’s cool people.
30
‘Wait, but Grace, you’re really cool!’ I hear you say. I know, I’m cool. I literally own Yeezys (they’re fake, but you wouldn’t know). I mean, the bar of being ‘cool’ is set pretty low at Oxford (apparently brains are the new dress sense), so at least for Oxford Uni standards, I’m cool… But I don’t often feel like I’m cool: I feel like I’m pretending. In tutorials, I pretend I did the reading and know about my subject. In social situations, I pretend I’m feeling fine and I love life and I wasn’t crying as I put my makeup on that morning. Not with my closest friends - they see me at my worst and at my best, and (hopefully) love me at all points on the spectrum, or at least tolerate me. But sometimes you have to pretend the water isn’t cold and just keep moving until you warm up. ‘It’s alright once you’re in’. Your brain might tell you that you should stay in bed all day, and you might need a rest, but also you might need to just cross the pain barrier and go for a walk or call a friend or do the thing you’re scared of doing. We need to get the balance right between ‘just pull your socks up and get on with it – think less, do more’ and ‘I’m not judging you for being scared, is there anything I can do to help?’ I was going to title this ‘just keep swimming’ but that felt a bit cliché. Another thing we don’t talk about: anxiety.
