Post: On social anxiety, and why pranksters can get fucked with a rusty chainsaw

Imagine that, inside of you, in your ribcage, there’s a smaller version of you looking at on the world as you experience it. And attached to you, by a leash, is a dog.

It’s a sweet dog – a really nice dog. When it’s just you and that dog, things tend to be cool and fun, and you guys enjoy romping around together and doing all the things that are best in doggsville. But when you’re around one person, that dog starts to get really alert – it doesn’t matter that you know this person, that dog is just at attention. You try to walk around and do stuff, but every so often, the dog stops and stares intently at some imagined threat, with ears perked. So in the outside, real world, you’re trying to have a conversation with this person – but internally, you’re trying to keep walking and keep up with the conversation, but you’re constantly having that leash go taught.

Add a few more people, and while outwardly, everything is fine, inside you, inside your ribcage, that dog is starting to make that tea-kettle-like whine – the one that is the very embodiment of doggy dread. That dog is convinced that something horrible is coming – thousands of years of evolution are firing off signal flares of RUN and TERROR and BAD. But because he loves you, he’s trying to be cool, trying to take cues from you. And as you’re having conversations with your friends, your train of thought is constantly getting derailed by this horrible sound of certain dread, and because you share a certain amount of genetic legacy, it’s starting to burrow into your skull, rattle around, and activate certain receptors.

And look, now it’s a full room of people. Your arm is getting repeatedly almost yanked out of its socket as the dog keeps flinging itself against the length of the leash. It wants to be fucking GONE right FUCKING NOW. There’s no rational equation being applied, terror is radiating off of this poor creature. And still, this is all happening inside of you. But you can tell that you’re one single thing away from the last strands of self-control coming apart. And all that terror is radiating out into you, priming you to no longer take in this room of friends and acquaintances – no, something very primal has forced you to start evaluating them all on a threat scale. And then it happens – maybe someone says something that, in and of itself is completely innocuous, and there is no intent of harm. Or maybe, while inside you there’s this poor beast that’s distracted you by begging you with all the non-words it has in its vocabulary to LEAVE, to FLEE, to GET OUT and be FAR AWAY, you knock something over or say something that is ill-considered.

And snap – now that creature is barking and keening in high terror wails of fear, throwing itself bodily against the door that’s really your ribcage, and scrabbling and scratching to obey the imperative to get to safety. And of course, this is all happening inside of you, no one can see or hear any of this, but it’s so goddamned loud inside of you that you can’t heard the real world. You can retreat inside of yourself to try and soothe this poor creature, but you know that at best, you will have an uneasy peace full of sharp, heavy vigilance. And so that’s it – you have to leave. You snap. You go. And of course, because no one in the real world can see or hear any of this, they give you queer, puzzling looks of what seems, through the lens of your own internal turmoil, must be varying measures of pity, concern, or perhaps a dulled-down scorn wrapped in the previous two.

Now, I live this every second of every minute of every hour of every day of my life. It never ends, but to varying degrees I have learned to connect with that inner animal and provide some of that calm. It ebbs and flows, so I have my good times and I have my bad times. I could curse this social anxiety inside of me, but were I to cut it out, I fear that I would also be removing much of my own capacity for empathy with my fellow human being. Were I to go back in time and somehow magically remove it, I know that the endless series of bullying that I went through would have been greatly reduced, but I also know that I wouldn’t be nearly as good a person as I am today. So like so many things, it’s both a blessing and a curse. And I bring this up, because a few days ago on Reddit, I saw this video posted:

The title of the post to Reddit is “Uptight douchebags completely overreacts to a spider-prank”. And I have to warn you, if you watch it, you’re probably going to fucking rage hard. Because holy shit, I feel for the guy. Apart from the fact that spiders genuinely scare the shit out of me, there’s no way to know what this person has going in inside of them at that time. For many of us, the simple act of doing anything that appears remotely normal and plain is like taking the beach at Normandy over and over again, because you’re fighting all of those instincts that tell you to run and hide and be far away, and through a herculean effort, you manage to create a safe space for yourself in public. And in one instant, it’s fucking stolen right out from underneath you, along with your dignity and feelings of any sort of respect. And worse, for a cheap laugh, someone else’s entertainment. And even worse than that, on camera, to be replayed over and over again, and the knowledge of that will burrow into your head like the worms in Wrath of Khan, wrapping themselves around your brainstem and darkly chuckling over your lack of dignity in the dark hours of the night.

Shit like this can never be “just a joke” to people like me. That the war and toxic by-product occur entirely inside of us, never leaving the walls of our skull, is immaterial. It’s fucking evil and nasty and wrong, and when you do this, and people make it clear that they’re traumatized, you’re a bully. And if you see a bully, you call them out on that shit. Shame them. You shouldn’t have to wait for blood to call it a wound.