“Just ask for help.”
“I’m here if you need me.”
“I won’t bite.”
“Let me know if you need any help.”

If you have social anxiety you most-likely know exactly how the above statements make me feel.

YES. I NEED HELP. YES. I KNOW YOU WILL NOT BITE. That doesn’t help, strangely enough. It doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable talking to anyone. It doesn’t make me feel like any less of an idiot when I ask the teacher to explain something to me. It doesn’t lessen my anxiety whatsoever. It makes me feel like an idiot. A coward. A loser. A little kid. It doesn’t remove the iron fist from around my chest or stop the pounding in my head or the excessive sweating or the tears forming in my eyes or the sick feeling in my stomach. It doesn’t make me any less paranoid about what you’re going to tell people (even if I know you won’t tell anyone) or what you think of me or what other people think when they look at me. It doesn’t make the feeling that something is going to go wrong go away. It doesn’t make it any easier for me.

It’s like there’s this invisible cage of thorns surrounding me, cutting me off from anything I want to do. I see that there are people who care about me…I see that help is easily available. But whenever I try to reach out and touch it, the thorns stop me. When I was little I used to think it was the people around me hurting me, but as I got older I realized that it wasn’t them. It was something else. I still have a hard time trusting anyone. I know it’s not anyone else’s fault. They don’t know that I’ve got these invisible thorns all around me. They can’t see them. They can’t feel the pain it causes or the insecurity that follows me like a dark cloud…but it’s there…