I’m at a very low point right now, after becoming aware of some uncomfortable truths about myself the past couple of months and I don’t think I’ve ever hated myself with this kind of intensity before. Thinking about some of my behavioural pattern and ‘f*ck ups’ makes me feel physically revolted by myself.
It takes very little to send me into a downward spiral resembling a panic attack and I often can’t stop crying for hours and have to fight off the urge to seriously hurt myself or just end it all every time that happens. I feel like a monster for a variety of reasons.

I’ve realized that I carry a lot of trauma surrounding social interactions with me and I know that the only healthy way to lessen the negative impact of that is building resilience and making new positive memories.
The thing is that I am profoundly uncomfortable with a lot of irl activities that offer opportunities to make new connections – either because of sensory overload (parties and anything that involves moderately sized to big crowds and lots of noise), severe social anxiety (shout out to the trauma – I have a tendency to f*ck up interactions in miniscule ways, which might not be a big deal to othe people in the grand scheme of things, but I am aware that my overall behaviour is not ‘likeable’ and that I read as ‘rude’, tense, weird, stand-offish, self-absorbed and generally ‘off’ quite often, so not exactly ‘likeable’ by any means) or simply because it doesn’t interest me one bit (of course I should be more open minded and willing to try new things, but pushing myself out of my comfort zone in that regard currently backfires a lot and makes me more likely to withdraw further into my shell).
Online socializing feels a lot safer, but I’m also kind of bad at it since texting is incredibly draining for me and I don’t have the energy for it the vast majority of the time and I am somehow even worse at keeping a conversation alive online than in person, so I am very, very prone to ghosting unfortunately.
I know I’m making a lot of excuses with all of that. I’m scared out of my mind of social rejection and would do pretty much anything to avoid feeling shame, although that a lot of this stuff is self-sabotaging, self-pitying and very, very irrational. And the tension between that knowledge and my emotional ‘reality’ is threatening to tear me apart, because a life like this is miserable and horribly lonely and it is not helping me, but actively reinforcing unhealthy patterns to the degree where my fears become self-fullfillimg prophecies.
And yet I let my fear “win” all the time, because it’s the path of least resistance in my brain.