"Socially Awkward"

I have always found it difficult to make friends. Normal day to day interactions make me nervous. And yet, I’m often perceived as very confident and outgoing. Welcome to my world where opposites co-exist. I laugh & I smile. And I find it tedious. You see, I grew up in an unconventional setup; no parents; no siblings; raised by grandparents. And at one point of my life, I was an abuse victim. Mix all that up and you have a recipe for either a socially awkward guy or a psychopath. Thank God I am the former. (Still haven’t ruled out the latter.)

For a large part of my life, I have been perceived as “weird”. When I was in school, I was widely unpopular for no apparent reason. I was most nice to people but they’d ridicule me or not talk to me at all. I kept trying to get into people’s good books for a while, but when that didn’t work, I gave up. I started getting into little tiffs with people who wouldn’t accept me. But I haven’t been the violent or disruptive type so my tiffs were mostly verbal. Eventually I learnt to ignore people.

When I came to college, it was a whole different ball game. I have described my ordeals in an earlier article. I did make some friends in college but I was still a difficult person. Life changed a lot after we graduated. I started working and got busy with my job. With the kind of job culture that we have in our country, it is anyway difficult to maintain a very active social life. So the lack of my social circle became less noticeable. And how people perceived me also changed (to some extent) because I kept on moving to different cities for my job and never really settled down at one place for anyone to notice that I was different.

A year earlier, an ex-girlfriend had pointed out that I was different now than I was before. Now this was a person who had seen me at a time when I wasn't that different from who I am today - but she pointed out that I have changed in how I talk about myself. The moment of truth came when I had this chest pain and went to see a doctor - after several tests, they concluded that there was nothing wrong with my body, other than slightly high blood sugar levels. The doctor said I most probably had a stress-related incident i.e. a panic attack. I discussed it with a few colleagues - I tried to laugh it away but all of them suggested that I should seek counselling.

The need for counselling became very evident when I started staying too stressed out for elongated periods. The panic attacks became frequent. So I went to a psychiatrist last year. He diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. He said that my social anxiety was a very common phenomenon but I did need medication for the stress if it was hampering my day-to-day life and peace. He also suggested facing my stressors and working on my personality.

Fast forward eight months and here I am. I weaned of the meds and my stress level is quite in control. I did all the stuff that my psychiatrist had suggested and it worked too. Social interactions don’t stress me out as much as they used to. But no miracles happened. I didn’t start making friends all of a sudden. I’m still the person I was, but maybe slightly better balanced than I was earlier. I can’t tell you if people like me or not because frankly, I don’t know for sure. And at this point in my life, that doesn’t really make much of a difference anyway. I’m relatively happy and coping well with each new day.