New Territory: Graduating and Dating

{Feeling clever because the title rhymes}

I graduated from Lancaster in July.

I moved back in with my parents.

Up till now I’ve been missing Lancaster so much.

I spent two months so far (although technically longer) obsessing about a chance I may have had and definitely missed at uni because of my “shyness” (mostly) and deciding not to get over it so that at least it wouldn’t happen again (that’s a bit deep, sorry!). I also spent that time looking for jobs and things.

I got a part time job! Something pretty basic just to earn money.

I also got a voluntary job in a warehouse just 15 minutes walk from my house, copy-writing for an online shop, which started last week. So now I don’t have an excess of free time thankfully!

On my first day there, I was introduced to someone (it was the first day, so introductions all around).

On my second day there (exactly a week ago), I talked to this person at lunch time and had a great conversation and maybe half an hour later quite by surprise this person came up to me while I was by myself painting one of the warehouse’s photo booth rooms white and asked me out.

The other night we did.

And I thought I would write all these life updates on separate lines just to be annoying.

And I’m trying to figure it all out right now. This guy has gone straight from A-Z and got incredibly emotionally invested really fast, so in a way that’s slightly terrifying for me because it gives me a massive sense of responsibility not to put a foot wrong and hurt this person’s feelings. And it has not happened before; this is absolutely foreign territory. And I need a lot more time myself just to find A.

And I have always expected that my social anxiety to be a massive problem if I ever went on a date with someone but it actually wasn’t, and we talked about everything under the sun for over 3 hours, past closing time (I think the people running the pub must have felt bad about chucking us out and kept it open longer instead or something). I wasn’t even that nervous beforehand (but maybe that’s because I didn’t build up to it feeling that emotionally invested), and it’s funny because I barely even got nervous for the interview for the job I just started, and was completely calm throughout, so maybe I’m just going through a good patch anxiety-wise. And we could relate to each other in so many ways: we have similar highly introverted personalities, are both only children in our families, both love writing (although about different things), are both very emotional people, both believe in God, have both been bullied in school, both have anxiety… in fact the conversation got surprisingly deep as we talked about the latter few things for maybe the last hour and to be honest I don’t know how I opened up so easily when I have trouble discussing some of the these things so easily with any of my friends.

But I’m very conflicted about it inside and overthinking a lot now; but that’s a different story. I just felt like updating this because it must have been a couple of centuries since I last did that.

Am I a horrible person?

 I’m really ready to go back to university now after the 4 summer month break. I have some great friends at home but… and it sounds really harsh… I’m ready to go back to university and not have to… I feel horrible saying it. 

Maybe it’s more of an introvert thing than a social anxiety thing but I feel like I’ve had more than enough socialising time back here. And I almost want to be a recluse for a while. But it’s not quite that because I also miss my uni friends a lot and I can’t wait to see them. 

A few very minor personality clashes have happened this summer but nothing serious. Just niggling things that always come up now and again. So it might be that as well. Also I felt like I let a friend down a bit today when I agreed to something and then backed out because I realised that might be a decision that would be bad for my anxiety. I think she was really disappointed. If I could be a recluse and have my very own straw hut in the Alps that might not have been a thing.

Anyway, disclaimer, I love my friends and I wouldn’t trade them. I hope I’m not an awful human being 👍

Being Open about Anxiety for the First Time with Parents: Pt 1

I hinted that this post was coming here, so here we go.

Context: It occured to me that I had social anxiety for the first time when I was 16 because I was really disturbed by the amount of shyness I was experiencing and this got me doing some intense googling on the topic. The idea that my extreme shyness met enough criteria to be classified as something called “social anxiety disorder” and that this was classified as a “mental illness” was probably the aspect of this which bothered me most, and to some extent still does. I feel like I’ve been thinking and perhaps overthinking this topic ever since then (the fact I have a blog about it makes that kinda self evident doesn’t it?) but in the following five years I’ve made a big thing of not talking about it (with one or two slight exceptions). Not out of any feeling of shame