While watching an anime called No Matter How I Look At It, I couldn’t help but laugh at the main character. Her name is Tomoko and she has terrible social anxiety and wants to be able to talk to people but she also has such a horrible perspective on her classmates. She rarely realises how ironic some of her thoughts are (i.e. she mentally made fun of a group of popular girls for changing their appearance and, yet, she went home and changed her own.) Tomoko reminds me of late elementary, early middle school me. Conversation was always hard and even just going out and ordering food was difficult. I even used to think the popular students at my school were overrated and fake.
Of course, I grew up, not completely, but enough that talk wasn’t as difficult. Granted, you wouldn’t have seen me talking with most of my classmates regardless of the year but I didn’t really connect well with most of them. I realize that this wasn’t anyone’s fault. Some people just don’t click well together.
But, again, things are so different. I still remember moments of my social anxiety getting in the way and I laugh, now. It’s so easy to talk once you’ve started but, of course, during my early middle school years I would be struggling to even think about having a conversation. My stomach would hurt and, for some reason, trying to talk would be all I could think about. I wouldn’t, but boy could I think about doing it. I’d be just like Tomoko, imagining whole scenarios of talking and befriending my classmates, even though I had no real connection with any of them.
I’m still trying to get better about socializing and still run into roadblocks where all I do is think about talking but I don’t actually do any of it. Most of time, I find the best way to get over my social anxiety is to just talk.
