Social phobia sucks.

 I've gotten quiet again. I have stopped talking about things like my spirituality even with Beloved. I'm terrified of being judged. I know that he won't judge me. I know I can talk to him about anything. At the same time, this creeping terror gnaws at me and tells me that no one wants to hear what I have to say, not even the man I love the most.

Since the beginning of the pandemic in our region, I've functionally been housebound. I haven't gone grocery shopping in over a year. After I got the vaccine, I bought some clothes and struggled with this mishmash of feelings. I felt guilt over buying new clothes. I felt excitement about buying them and transitioning my wardrobe to something more authentically me. I felt gratitude that I was out of the house doing something 'normal' for the first time in a long time. And I felt creeping terror that the vaccine wasn't enough and I was still going to catch Covid-19 and die.

My anxiety keeps ramping up and when it does that it gets harder to be social. I find myself reliving the emotional trauma of the bullying I endured in school as a kid. (Including and not limited to people trying to light me on fire and spreading rumors that I was a whore so extensively that I had students from the local college ask me at 16 what the cost of a blow job was in public. It was awful.) I find myself reliving the emotional trauma of how my parents raised me and the scorn that they heaped upon me when I was in a depressive episode. I find myself reliving the mockery they made of my desire to become a professional author.

All of that together, I find I just scroll through social media platforms and struggle to reach out and even post stupid memes. I just lurk and feel left out. I know that no one is excluding me. I just have to post something, even if it's a few words. At the same time, I can't bear the thought of being utterly ridiculed and harassed. I've carefully curated my social media accounts to keep people who are kind in them and yet I am terrified that they'll prove as bad as the harpies that I had to deal with as a kid.

I don't know what to say. I feel lost and afraid. And I hurt very deeply. I should probably be working on this stuff with a therapist but none of the therapists in my area take my health insurance. And I'll be damned if I go back to the county mental health clinic for any reason. They made my life a thousand times worse with their bungling, ham handed, ill spirited bullshit. I'll not go back there even if I was paid to do it. So, I just write in my notebooks and feel awful. I'm going to try to be social, but it is very hard. And I feel like I am somehow defective because I can't bring myself to do it when it comes so easily to virtually everyone else.