This feeling is what differentiates people who are said to be suffering from social phobia from the normal people. You may joke about it. You might think ‘I don’t give a damn what those idiots think about me. I don’t care. I have got my life and I decide what I want to do about it’.
But suppose you went for an interview for that post of IT manager you have always wanted at Microsoft. Three top officials are sitting behind a table and they are observing you while you answer their questions. It is not just about getting the answers right, you want to be perfect in every sense. You want your clothing to be perfect – not too shabby but not too formal either as most IT companies prefer chilled out geeks. The way you speak, you should not be too authoritative nor should you be stammering or getting stuck in the middle of a sentence. You should not jump onto your answers before they finish asking the questions nor should there be a 30 sec delay for the answer to begin flowing from your mouth sitting below that well trimmed mustache (if you are a Mexican or an Indian). There is an element of fear. your heart rate goes up because just in case something goes wrong…that anxiety gets to you, releasing catecholamines in your blood stream, you get that flushed look, that sense of impending doom, you want to get out of there and just be alone and forget about it.
You take care of a lot of things which you don’t seem to care about in your normal day to day to life. This is where you are different from someone suffering from social phobia. To someone like me, the whole world is interviewing me 24*7. I have to be very careful about everything. I am concerned about what others think about me. Every single thing I do, like eating or walking or just normal (only to you) conversations, I am concerned of what the public thinks. I get a feeling that it is never adequate no matter how hard I try. I could have made a better impression on the people. It always seems to be going wrong.
So with time I learn that avoiding such situations helps a lot. If I sit in my room all day long I can do whatever I want, without the fear of people observing me. I am safe. Inside my room I am like a normal person. I am not self conscious. I am free to think about a lot of other things. things which normal people think all the time. You get to think what I go through daily only during interviews or during a date with that really hot girl you have been stalking for the past six weeks.
That’s the difference between you and me.
It is not that simple to overcome this fear. You cannot decide one day that from now on I am a normal human being and go out and start talking to people. It does not work. Because in case you did make such a decision and you are trying it out, you will end up thinking if I am doing this right or wrong. You end up worrying more about what you are doing than usual. This is just like trying to forget a bad incident in your life. the more you try to forget the more you tend to remember it for decades.
So all I have is a humble request to the normal human beings. Please do not mock us. What we have is truly a medical condition. We need help. We avoid people but that does not mean that we cannot be friends. We need your support. Eventually we will get accustomed to one or two of you and then we might actually be able to go out in the community.
Please. Please don’t laugh at us.
