The Hours After

On social anxiety, the fear of being known, and the exhausting work of questioning everything.

Richard Hernandez | OUTPOST 27 | The Margins / Human Nature

I can have a perfectly good conversation with someone and spend the next several hours wishing I had never opened my mouth.

It doesn't matter whether I know the person well. Family, friends, coworkers, people at church, someone I've only just met. I can enjoy their company. Laugh. Have something useful to contribute. For a little while, I'm simply there with them.

Then I go home.

And the conversation begins again, this time without anyone else present.

Did I talk too much? Why did I say that? Did I sound arrogant? Were they only being polite?

Do they actually like me?

I can take an ordinary interaction and spend hours constructing an argument against myself. A pause becomes discomfort. A facial expression becomes disapproval. Something I said without thinking becomes evidence of a character flaw I apparently failed to notice until afterward.

Perhaps I noticed something genuine. Perhaps I didn't. That's part of what makes it difficult. I don't know what another person was thinking, and my mind seems unwilling to leave that question unanswered.

There are things worth examining. I can be obnoxious. I can interrupt, speak too confidently, or become so interested in answering a question that I forget someone else might have something to say. I don't want to excuse poor behavior merely because recognizing it makes me uncomfortable.

But there is a difference between recognizing a mistake and holding a private trial over every conversation I've had.

I have trouble knowing when I've crossed that line.

Even reassurance can become part of the case. Someone tells me they enjoyed talking with me, and I believe them until I begin wondering whether they were simply being kind. I demand evidence of something I have no way of proving, then question the evidence when it arrives.

Sometimes this becomes physical. My chest tightens. My breathing changes. I become restless, frightened, and desperate to escape a situation that ended hours ago. I have worked myself into a panic attack while sitting alone after an interaction that, by every reasonable measure available to me, may have gone well.

I understand how irrational that sounds.

Understanding it doesn't make it stop.

I can recognize an assumption and still feel its weight. I can know that silence isn't necessarily rejection and still struggle to believe it when someone hasn't responded. The mind can become remarkably committed to an investigation for which it has almost no reliable evidence.

What makes this harder to understand is that I actually like people.

I want sincere friendships. I want to serve at church without returning home to wonder whether everyone would have preferred my silence. I want relationships that can survive disagreement, awkwardness, and the less flattering parts of being human.

I don't need people to think I'm perfect.

At least, I don't believe I do.

What frightens me is that someone might know me well enough to decide they would rather not.

There's a difference between worrying that I made a poor impression and fearing that the impression was accurate. The first asks whether I said the wrong thing. The second wonders whether the problem was me all along.

I can spend an afternoon feeling connected to people and an evening recovering from having allowed myself to be seen.

But there is something unfair in how I respond to that fear.

When I decide someone secretly dislikes me, I assign that person thoughts they never expressed. I turn their kindness into something suspicious and their silence into something accusatory. Without asking them, I make them participants in a judgment taking place entirely inside my own head.

I suffer as though they said it aloud.

That is not a particularly reliable way to understand another person. It also doesn't give them much freedom to be anything other than what I'm afraid they are.

As a Christian, I find another problem here.

I believe I'm called to love people, listen to them, serve them, and take their needs seriously. Yet I can leave a conversation and spend hours thinking about myself. How I sounded. Whether I was appreciated. Whether I embarrassed myself.

It's tempting to call that pride. Sometimes pride may be involved. I know I enjoy being appreciated, and I am perfectly capable of making a conversation more about my contribution than the person in front of me.

But I don't believe insecurity and pride are interchangeable merely because both can turn our attention inward. Someone may become consumed with himself because he thinks too highly of himself. He may also become consumed with himself because he fears everyone else thinks very little of him.

Neither leaves much room to see the other person clearly.

I can leave a conversation intending to consider whether I loved someone well, only to find that the question has quietly become whether they loved me in return.

That troubles me more than the possibility of having sounded foolish.

I don't know precisely where this fear began. Rejection has probably shaped some of it. So have experiences that made relationships feel less secure than I wanted them to be. But I don't want to invent certainty about my own suffering just because a tidy explanation would make it easier to understand.

I know what I experience. I don't necessarily know everything that produced it.

What I do know is that the fear can make being alone very appealing.

I could become quieter, not because I've learned to listen, but because I'm afraid to speak. I could avoid people I genuinely care about because I don't want to risk discovering they don't care about me in the same way. I could begin calling that isolation peace.

There is relief in being alone. I know that relief well.

But relief isn't always evidence that something is good for us. Sometimes it only means we've found a way to avoid what frightens us.

I don't want to fear making those decisions for me.

I will annoy people sometimes. I'll say something poorly, misunderstand a situation, or speak when I should have listened. Some people will disagree with me. Some will misunderstand me. Some may genuinely dislike me.

None of those possibilities can be eliminated without eliminating the risk of being known at all.

And I cannot demand the freedom to be fully human while expecting every encounter with another person to end in approval.

There is a difference between being disliked and being unlovable. I understand that distinction intellectually. Living with it is another matter.

I don't know what it feels like to leave a room full of people and simply allow the experience to end. To go home, have dinner with my wife, read something, and enjoy the rest of the evening without investigating whether I deserved to be in that room.

It sounds like such a small thing.

To have a conversation and let it end.

My faith doesn't make this struggle disappear. I believe God knows me completely, including the motives I don't always understand in myself. I believe His love isn't secured by my ability to control other people's impressions of me. But believing something is true and living as though it is true are not always the same thing.

There are days when I understand grace far better than I know how to receive it.

I don't have a method that makes the questions stop. I still replay conversations, still worry that I was too much, still mistake uncertainty for evidence when I'm frightened enough.

I want to be able to recognize a real mistake, correct it when I can, and leave it there. I want to give people the dignity of meaning what they say instead of continually replacing their words with my fears.

I cannot make everyone like me. I don't particularly want to become someone who needs that to be true.

But there is something terribly sad about wanting to love people and repeatedly experiencing their company as something from which I must recover.