Social Anxiety

I am a painfully shy person. You may not know it from what I write in these blog entries. But I am. I find it difficult to talk to people normally. A lot of the times, some of the humor here comes off bad in the “real world.” In fact,  let’s just say all of it does. I think it may be that some of my deeper darker moments tend to  upset some people. A lot of people really think you have it together. When in reality, when you don’t it makes people uncomfortable. As a guy, it’s tough, because you are required to keep things together. To be tough. I’ve given out a perception sometimes of this toughness. I think drinking booze it bridged that really weird gap of inhibition. Being drunk meant that you could express yourself, without the filter of what people thought of you. In your mind you may believe being frank with people draws you closer. In some cases they do. But what you end up with is a LOT of people you don’t want to be around. Other broken people like yourself.

I’m not implying that you should fake being a good person. I think everyone is. Deep down inside. But, if you’ve lived a long life of being hurt or felt a constant pain that you were owed something that wasn’t delivered, you’re going to find yourself in a VERY lonely place. I suffer from it. I am in my own mind. The type of person I am, is the person I most dislike. They are the ones I point at and worry about snapping. In fact, there a dude I sometimes (frighteningly) look at as my own future when I turn 50 years of age. No family, no real friends, just a shell of a man and his hobbies. He doesn’t seem happy. Doesn’t seem sad. But he’s fixed in his belief system with the refusal to take another point of view. His ideals are disturbingly focused. He is capable of rationalizing bad behavior. And he isn’t wrong in some of his assessment, he’s just a few inches off of center. This is a man you worry about. I’ve worked in other artistic endeavors in the past. I’d get really odd emails from him questioning things that don’t need to be questioned. He clearly has a thing for a model he wanted me to work with. We worked together on another project. Total professional thing. He seemed…jealous. Awkwardly jealous. Stalker-ly jealous. But it’s not forefront. It’s an undercurrent of someone watching you. Yeah, paranoid. BUT, this is the neighbor that always wondered how he could do awful things when he was “such a quiet nice young man.”

I have cleaned up myself from booze. But my decades of abuse has caught up to me. I can only wait it out. Suffering symptoms of what I can only blame myself over. I think about all my relatives and family members. The ones that never knew my addiction. I feel for them, the same as when Elizabeth Pena’s family felt for her. They  may’ve never known the struggle. I wonder, at the age of 39, if I came to the conclusion early enough. She went out at 55. Had I done more abuse in my time, then she did stretched out in life. I think more and more we’re getting substance abuse stories. Elisabeth Vargas on ABC has been suffering recently too. It’s so shocking. Considering there’s probably a TON more people that haven’t come out. How booze has destroyed the inside and the out of us. It’s shameful, considering our industry is all about being social. Which is odd from people with social anxiety.