The Dreaded Letters

Listen to this post HERE

This is a post I was going to write but then didn’t because ~anxiety~ but then it came up in my life as a topic so I thought I would.

I am going to tell you a story about the time I was rude intentionally.

Now, you might be thinking: “what?!! rude on purpose, why?!!” Don’t worry…you’ll find out.

We are time traveling back to the year 2015. I am freshly out of high school and eighteen years of age. If I’m awkward now, back then I was a whole other level of awkward. I suppose awkward may be the wrong word and anxious might be the right choice.

I am anxious now about health and germs and back then that was the same but I also highly cared about the way I was perceived by others which meant that all day long I was over thinking my interactions with other humans.

I had just had a graduation party where I was told I had to hug all my guests, and if you know me you know I hate hugs, which left me thinking about how my body was being used to greet people all day long. “Was that okay? Was that too long? Too short? Was that weird for them too?”

I got gifts and money and many many oral congratulations. I felt thankful to have so many people in my life who wanted to show me that they were proud of me finishing the thing I had a very hard time attending: school.

I started off by writing thank you cards to show my gratitude to people who came or sent their well wishes. I sent about 200 of the 500 thank you cards I wrote. Yes you read that correctly, I did write roughly 500 and I only sent roughly 200.

Why? Well because of that not so cute friend of mine called anxiety. I didn’t know if I had said the right thing, or if maybe I said the wrong gift even though I triple checked it, or maybe my handwriting didn’t look absolutely perfect. And the list could go on and on.

So what I did with my signed, sealed, and stamped thank you cards is I put them in a cupboard. I let them sit for five years and when I found them I recycled them. To me it was better to seem rude than to have someone view something I did as embarrassing.

Now, I think that it’s embarrassing that I thought that way, but I did. And that’s okay. I learned and lived to tell the tale.

We time travel back to the present and I am a person who will write a thank you card promptly because I know it’s important to show my gratitude towards others. If I say something someone doesn’t like precisely or my handwriting isn’t perfect in their eyes? Sounds like their problem and not mine. I don’t mean that in a rude way just a “I can’t have that severe of social anxiety anymore” type of way.

People don’t really understand how anxiety can affect someone’s actions. So if you are a person who has never experienced anxiety or you are a person that has, remember that anxiety can really make someone do things that they normally never would.

I hope that you can feel confident in your choices and to do the things that will make you feel best!

Until next time,

-H