Avoidant Personality Disorder (and Social Anxiety in general)

Hi all. It's been a while since I've posted, and since then I've stumbled upon a Wikipedia article that made me think really, really hard. Like, preoccupied the last three days.

Avoidant Personality Disorder


I've been doing a lot of reading on this, and realized that all of my oddest traits and sources of misery, loneliness and depression in my life up until now was laid out nicely in the World Health Organization's diagnostic list. Now, while I'm sure that self-diagnosis isn't exactly a good or smart thing to do, there's always the saying about walking like a duck and so on...

It really struck a nerve. Just now I was watching a youtube video made by a bunch of psychology students in one of the Asian countries (I suspect Singapore, but I didn't read the comments to make sure**Checked- it's in Malaysia**). While the acting is what you'd expect from psych students with no acting experience, the person playing the "subject" is spot-on in her portrayal. This was me when the condition was at its worst.

It's a strange condition, one of contradictions. You want a boy/girlfriend so badly, you spend your time fantasizing about getting the perfect boy/girlfriend, then when you stand in front of someone cute you get so worried about what you're going to say that what you do spit out is either unintelligible Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness or a stammered introduction followed by silence as you're worried that you said that too fast and turned them off you. After finding a reason to politely excuse yourself from their presence early, you head home, smoke weed and watch youtube for hours, alone, sitting on your bed, confident that it would have never worked out between you and them anyways, while fantasizing about them anyway.

In my experience, I had it peak probably in my early twenties. Since then I've learned quite a bit about functioning in society through sheer force of will. Working retail really helped as it got me out of the house and interacting with actual, live people. It was hell at first, but a video rental place was great, as I could duck off of cash once in a while to put films back on the shelf (to get some alone time) and could follow a predictable "Blockbuster card, please. Cash or credit card?" pattern while just introducing enough difficult randomness through late fee disputes to give my anxieties some workout and chance to become jaded. One thing I've never had much problem with was criticism. While I still don't like receiving it (it sets off many deep triggers. Seriously, watch that above youtube video and watch the part where she's coldly told off my the interviewer - that's an avoidant's worst nightmare), I've learned to tell the difference between constructive and personal criticism.

Being in art school helped - if someone said that your package design could have used a more bluish green, it's not the end of the world as they were trying to educate you on colour theory and help you out, not put you down.

In the last year, I've made a ton of progress, and I still don't know how, besides . :icon_redf Coming out was probably the single hardest thing I've ever had to do, but by the time I did it I had enough preparation that I was still able to do it. Due to the way I pay extremely vigilant attention to people, I still get overly worried about the results before I speak. It used to be that this would happen in almost every conversation that wasn't with someone I was comfortable with, which was my (at most) two or three friends.

Anyways, I can ramble at this for hours, but I just had to get it off my chest. So maybe I'll pose a question - is there anyone else here with avoidant tendencies or other social anxieties/phobias that can share your stories? Use the anonymity of the internet to get your voice out.