Most of the time I like to think I'm doing great handling my anxiety. I have never been to a doctor or spoken to a therapist but I've discovered what my triggers are and have undergone my own exposure therapy to help it go away. But then I come home after a trip to visit my boyfriend's family and start crying when he tells me his family thought I was distant.
I like to think I'm doing well but I'm not. I want to go to therapy and have someone to talk to but I can't afford $100 a session and insurance doesn't cover it. Sometimes I get close to opening up to my boyfriend about how anxiety affects me but I don't want to rely on him for my emotional needs so I explain it as my personal issues and leave it at that. Having him talk to me about his family feeling unable to talk to me and thinking I was unhappy and uncomfortable during the trip hurt me. Not because of what he said but the fact that these kinds of issues just won't go away. I don't think I've made a new friend since I was 16 and I'm 22 now. I just seem to have this inability to connect with new people and I just can't converse like a normal human. I wanted so badly for his parents to like me because I didn't make the best impression the first time. I felt great coming home from the trip, I felt like I fit in with the family more but when my boyfriend talked to me it felt like I was delusional the whole time. How I felt and how others felt was so different, it crushed me.
I don't know how to talk to people. I thought it was just starting conversations I had trouble with but maybe I have trouble keeping them going too. I wish I could be the perfect daughter-in law, helping out around the house, telling funny stories, bonding over shared hobbies but I guess I'm just the girl his family secretly hopes he breaks up with.
My boyfriend and I have had a special bond from the first day we met. Usually I'm super quiet on first dates so much so that my ex-boyfriend used to tell me it was my turn to talk and would not say a word to me until I started a conversation, that didn't work very well... With my current boyfriend it was a little awkward at the beginning but as we started to walk around and talk more, everything came so easily. When I talk to him it feels like I can say whatever I want without judgement. I don't need to second guess everything I want to say because he has always understood what I was saying and was receptive to my thoughts. That first day with him showed me everything I needed to know and from that moment on I knew I never wanted anyone else. Unfortunately this was one of the only times I've bonded with someone right away.
In school I would spend the first half of the year trying to form friendships and only got a couple of months to enjoy my friends before the summer came and went and I was yet again placed in a new class where I had no friends. You'd think with how often I was forced to make new friends that I wouldn't have a problem with social anxiety but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. In my school years I had big falling outs with my best friends that made me distrust friendship. I desperately wanted friends but I wanted friends that would be there for me forever not ones that would leave me because I wasn't good enough for them. To me it was all or nothing and since I couldn't have all I choose nothing. I'd hoped it would be something I'd grow out of as I got older but it didn't happen. In my first year of university I tried really hard to be friendly but yet again people were only my friends for class and when class ended they were gone. So I stopped trying and hoped that if I was meant to have friends it would just happen at some point. But here I am going into my last year of university and I'm still friendless.
At this point I really want to start improving myself and learning how to properly cope with my anxiety. However, without access to a therapist I worry that I'm stuck this way forever. At this point I don't even know who I am without the anxiety. I'm used to being a mess of a person. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be normal.
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