To continue the journey out of my social anxiety, by now well developed and deeply entrenched, I understood that I was going to have to go back in time. I wasn't born with it. I had to have learned it and accepted its harsh rules somewhere along my path. The need to isolate exactly when I began to suffer from it refused to leave me alone. I'm sure it happens at different points in life for different people. For some, it leaves as quickly as it appears, but for some of us, it doggedly follows us around for as long as we let it. By the time we know what it's called, we've had it so long we don't really know how it came to be such an annoying companion.
I don't remember much about that last summer before I started my first year of school at 5 years old. It's quite likely that my days were filled with dressing my Momma cat's kittens in doll clothes and pushing them around in a buggy. If I had to guess, I was a fairy or a witch, maybe a super human.
Being basically an only child (my two older brothers being much, much older and gone or nearly gone from the house) there were no limiters on my imagination. No mountain I couldn't climb, no adventure too large or scary, no lack of imaginary friends. Out in the middle of nowhere, on a hog farm in Iowa there wasn't very much social interaction for children other than their siblings. They didn't have pre-school back then. My parents tried to provide opportunities to play with other children or my cousins, mostly on holidays. Until I went to school, I led a fairly isolated little life.
Fitting in with other children in a social setting was not even the tiniest seed in my mind. Fitting in, not a concept for Kindergarten one would think. My assumption was "everyone is like me." I was filled with joy, exploration, awe and endless optimism; all young children are brimming with newly budding personalities. But I would soon begin to realize that perhaps my school mates weren't, or at the very least, if they were, they would be unwilling to trade the comfort of conformity for the right to keep them.
Population of the little town was 1,250 but the school also served the surrounding farming community. I couldn't even begin to tell you how old the school was in 1962 or how long it had been there, but it seemed ancient. The Kindergarten class was held in a small room as classrooms go, particularly by today's standards. The hardwood floors were already worn from many years of students more concerned with play than learning, shuffling their shoes across them. Walls were covered in a light, creamy colored plaster that had a slight sheen to it from layers and layers of paint. It smelled like furniture polish, dust and mildew, like the rest of the building. The door was the first at the top of the stairs to make it easier to find for us little folk. Other classrooms for the older children were scattered down the massive hallway which had one stairwell at each end. The recesses of the groaning old structure were scary, mysterious and out of reach.
So on the first day, of the first school year in our tender lives, there we were all together, princesses, firemen, astronauts, policemen, nurses, ballerinas and a couple of wayward pirates. Of course, we looked like school children to our teacher. I would be lying if I said I could recall her name, I'm not even sure what she looked like. It seems to me she must've been nice, but I'm pretty certain she had never met a 5 year old pirate.
At some point that day, she left us unattended, reason unknown. The other children all remained seated obediently as I looked at all of them incredulous. What a grand chance to play! After grabbing a nearby yardstick, I leaped to the top of the community table, and pulled it from an imaginary scabbard. I'm sure I was shouting like a swashbuckler might; ordering my crew to join me in the fray. I was met with glassy stares, no one moved. I twirled on the table top, brandishing my yardstick cutlass only to be greeted mid-twirl by the teacher who had returned from her errand. A formidable foe indeed, I laughed, just sure she would don her own leather tricorn hat with a dirty plume.
Instead, her face was stone, and I thought for a moment she wasn't real. But she was. I don't remember anything after that, but can only assume it was very unpleasant. I'm pretty certain there was lots of shaming, possibly tears, lack of sympathy from my fellow students, enter social anxiety.
What was once childish play and pretense, filled with boundless possibilities, now becomes the little voice in your head constantly reminding you to be someone else. Not for fun or for adventure but for protection, for survival, to mask the pain of rejection and avoid more at all costs. It follows you around spinning constant worry and regret. It repeats and replays your inadequacies and mistakes, further cementing you to the ground, clipping your wings and convincing you that who you really are is just not "normal". Shit, it convinces you that there is a normal and you're not it.
Social anxiety is born out of knowing we're somehow different and of not knowing when our actions would be deemed acceptable or unacceptable by those who exert control over our lives; a lesson that the very act of being us could bring on ridicule, punishment and ostracism. When you're a small child, you're thrown into the larger pond, you sink or swim, you "fit in" or you don't. Or you learn to hide your true self so you CAN fit in. That's how it starts. Living the lie that keeps you in fear; a fear that the true you will be exposed at any moment. The more people you are around, the more likely your cover will be blown, and then what? Remember?