"Don't let anyone, even your parents, break you. Find good people who you care about and surround yourself with them. If you can't find them at first, find good music and fall into it and let it hold you until they come."
~Davey Havok
*
*
*
There is a feeling that everyone feels; when you can't find what you are looking for and no matter how much you search your house for it, you just cannot find it? You're so annoyed because you know you put it in one place, but now that you go to that exact place to use it it's not there and no-one admits to moving it. It's like it miraculously grew two feet and just walked away on it's own.
That's the feeling I have right now. I've even reverted to asking my mother if she had someone moved it, but she denied everything.
"I haven't been to your apartment in weeks." She said. "I don't know why you thought I would have the time to do these things. I'm a busy woman!"
"You don't understand." I said into my phone's speaker. "It's not that I thought you moved it...I just can't lose that flash drive. It has everything that is valuable to me on it!"
"Brynn calm down. It's just a small stick of memory that we can easily replace. Please don't call me at work over something so trivial."
I ground my teeth at my mother's neutral voice. Of course she would say that. She's always so calm and collected.
"I would rather lose both of my arms then lose that small stick of memory!"
I heard a low sigh at my dramatic sentence, and a mumbled sign of departure before she ended the call.
My mother had thought that it could be easily replaced, but that was far from the truth. I had saved so many things on that flash drive: copies of bills, taxes, essays for class. The most terrifying part of all of this isn't that I lost some important files though. I lost something more private and more humiliating.
For the past two years I have been using my flash drive as a diary. It has all of my personal thoughts and feelings on it that I refused to share with anyone. It's the one thing that I can just talk to without being diagnosed or prescribed some sort of anti-depressant drug.
My parents were therapists so my whole life has been one of sharing my feelings. The only problem was that some of my feelings concerned my parents to the point that they thought I needed some sort of outside help. They hired a fellow therapist from their work that would meet with me twice a month until I was 16. I started when I was around 6 years old. That's ten years of therapy that I didn't want.
Let's get one thing straight though; I'm not crazy. I'm just scared of people. I have social anxiety that sometimes leads to panic attacks. It's a common condition that is not only the most frustrating thing on the planet, but it is like a disease without a concrete cure. It's something that a person has to fight through as if they were in a war. I've heard these ridiculous notions that it's something that a person just has to overcome, but what happens if someone can't overcome it? Is a person with arachnophobia willing to go through trial after trial of holding a tarantula to overcome his or her phobia of spiders? No, because why would someone willingly face the thing that they are afraid of? Social anxiety is no different. I would rather sleep in a room of spiders then talk to a total stranger and have him or her judge me for my personality. It's the scariest thing to me, so why should I have to be expected to socialize?
My parents would argue that my comparisons are totally different. In my opinion the only difference is that it's socially acceptable to be afraid of spiders, but it's considered 'weird' for a person to avoid talking to people. It's anti-social. Well excuse me for not wanting to barf my nervousness all over the person I'm talking to.
