An Account of My Personal Struggle with My Introversion, Social Anxiety, and Low Self-Esteem, for Anyone Who Feels the Same
“Oh, look, she really can talk!” “Danielle, why are you so loud all of the time?” “You just need to
have more confidence!” “You really need to talk to people more.”
All of my life, these have been the kinds of words that have
bombarded me in school, in church, and even at home. For almost as long as I
can remember, there has been this almost sick feeling inside of me that I am
not good enough, that I need to try harder, to be more than I already am. Early
in my life, I grew to hate that piece of me that was quiet and reserved, a
feeling which partly grew out of a fear of inadequacy. Since it was hard for me
to interact with people or enjoy social situations, there must be something
wrong with me. I must be somehow inferior to everyone else because it seems
easy enough for them to crack jokes, be funny, and openly speak in front of
others. I must be the broken one.
My transition into and out of this mindset is a long and
harrowing one. It has been, perhaps, the biggest journey that marks my life so
far, and like most journeys, there are parts of unspeakable pain, and parts of
unbelievable beauty. It is a hard road for me to travel back on, even in my
mind, because in some ways I can’t stand the person I was back then. However, I
am writing this for the sake of those who feel like I did, who feel wrong and
broken and alone. They need to know what I have learned, and perhaps my story
will help them come to a place where they can accept themselves for who they
are, and not for whom the world expects them to be.
Every journey needs a starting point, but truth be told,
mine is a little fuzzy. According to my mother and grandparents, when I was
very little, I was a pretty outgoing child who made friends easily. I remember
one account given to me, where my small four-year-old self dragged another
small little boy, whom I had just met, over to show him all about the nativity
scene we were attending. In my excitement, I explained all that I had learned
about the scene to my new friend. Later, on my first day of kindergarten, while
my mother worried and fretted about letting her first baby go off to school, I
hopped on the bus in a tizzy of confidence and anticipation. When Mom followed
me to the school and walked into the classroom to check on me, I even told her
it was going to be okay, that I was happy and she could leave me where I was. I
had a lot of fears as a small person, including dogs, heights, and loud noises,
but people and new situations were not among them.
But, somewhere along the line, my childlike confidence began
to crumble. I have a memory of my first day of first grade, where I got to the
door of my new classroom but was too afraid to step inside the door until
another little girl, my best friend from kindergarten, grabbed me by the hand
and pulled me inside. I became more and more withdrawn and less eager to speak
up around teachers and my fellow classmates. Truth be told, I can’t give a
reason why. A friend of mine recently said that all children have a time where
they struggle like I did, but the outcome all depends on how the situation is
treated. I suppose that is true, because I have no other explanation. I have
only snippets of memory from those first few years of elementary school, and in
chronological order each finds me more shy and withdrawn than the last. Then,
in third grade, my family made a huge transition. We moved. It was only across
town, but it meant that I would be moving schools. I was going to be thrown
into an entirely new situation, and unlike my kindergarten self, I wasn’t
feeling very confident about it.
On the first day of recess at my new school, I wandered
aimlessly around the blacktop, watching all of the other students playing,
running around, and having fun. I found a Frisbee and began pathetically
tossing it into the air and catching it, a lonely game for a seven year old to
play. Suddenly, a boy appeared from nowhere. “Hey, can I play? Toss it to me!”
Almost uncertainly, I began playing a game of Frisbee with the scrawny,
dark-haired, bespectacled boy, who over the next few months became my best
friend in the entire world. We played together, ate lunch together, talked and
laughed together. That was the first significant friendship of my life, and one
that has had a huge impact on me. But then, halfway through the year, he had to
change schools. It was very hard. I had no real friends outside of him, and
although our parents got us together to play a few times, it was pretty much
over. He was gone.
From this point on, I can pinpoint with surety the reason my
self-confidence began falling at an even more alarming rate, because over the
next several years there began a pattern in my life. I would find a friend,
become close to them, and then through choice they would leave me. Not through
unforeseen circumstances such as a move, but with the kind of cruelty that only
a child can show, they would remove themselves from my friendship and move on
to the next exciting person or popular friend, while I was left behind in the
dust, dazed and confused, wondering what had happened. In fourth grade I
managed to make a good friend, but she moved on after less than a year. What I
got out of the situation was that she left because I was a quiet person, and
that I bored her, so she simply went a got a new best friend. In fifth grade, I
was sort of isolated and alone. I had a few acquaintances, but no best friend.
My teacher would get exasperated with me at times, especially when we had to
choose partners for a group, because I would never go up to anybody and ask if
they wanted to work with me. I suppose I just assumed that nobody would want to
work with me, because I was quiet and dull. I remember her telling me once,
“Danielle, I can’t keep doing this for you! You need to go and talk to people
on your own!” I understand her frustration now, but at the time it just made me
feel worse about myself. Because of my fear, and low self-esteem, I was being a
burden to my teacher. I sank even further into the lie that I was a broken
wreck.
I didn’t make any really good friends again until sixth
grade, when I switched again to a small Christian school. I was anxious at
first, and started out a little shakily, but I ended up making some friends. We
were a small class, so I had a large circle of acquaintances and people I
eventually felt comfortable around and enjoyed spending time with, but my
smaller circle of friends was sort of the misfit group. I say this mostly
because I and my best friend at the time were kind of like a gang unto
ourselves, and we took in another girl who was struggling with being accepted.
We would spend recess sitting on the steps of the middle school trailers,
talking and reading and drawing together. Sleepovers were a must, of course,
and they were tons of fun. We ran around yelling, jumped on trampolines, went
on adventures, and filmed movies where we pretended to be serial killers
(although we had no idea what that term meant, I’m pretty sure). Those were
amazing times, and for me they lasted for about a year and a half. But as they
say, all good things must come to an end. In the middle of seventh grade, fear
started to creep back in. I began noticing how there were two groups of people
in our classes: “popular,” and “everyone else.” Although I scoffed at the ways
of the popular students, I was secretly upset at how they never seemed to notice
me, and how I felt on the outside. And then the bullying began. There was one
kid in particular who terrified me and angered me all at once. He was a short,
obnoxious boy who loved attention and frequently tried to shock people with his
words and attitudes. In my diary, I can sense a certain frustration I had when
I wrote about what he said or what he did; not just towards him, but also
towards myself. When he spoke badly about my friends or a teacher, or spread a
rumor, or made fun of somebody in “good natured” humor, I was too much of a
coward to say anything or do anything about it. To my great shame, my worst
fear was that he would turn it all on me. I had this idea in my head that if he
noticed me, he would spread a rumor about me, or call me names, or draw
unwanted attention to me, which I was sure I couldn’t handle. So, I began to
distance myself from my friends. I went more into myself than ever before,
trying to be invisible in a class of eleven. For the remainder of my middle
school career, I was alone, and scared, and ashamed.
These feelings even followed me into my church’s youth
group. I know that I was ignored at first, both by the youth pastor and even
all of the older students, but afterwards I think I deluded myself into
thinking I was being ignored. I went on Wednesday nights, and Sunday mornings,
in a pattern that drained me and left me feeling like I had been grated raw. I
felt this pressing need to talk, to laugh, to be accepted, but I didn’t know
how to even begin doing so. I escaped as often as I could, sitting with my
parents in their Sunday school or helping them in the nursery during church,
but of course that didn’t help much. I only felt more isolated than ever. It
was a vicious cycle. The more I tried to escape, the deeper I dug myself in.
Then came high school.
Due to extenuating circumstances, I was actually
homeschooled during ninth grade, which was a blessing in disguise. It was
wonderful to spend a year at home with my mother. It made me closer to her, I
didn’t have to deal with so much social stress, and it made me a much better
student by teaching me to learn things on my own. It was like an island of calm
in a sea of storms. During that year, I talked to my mother, who is a counselor,
in depth about all of my social anxiety, and she was able to give me tips and
support. I even went to go see a counselor for a while. I can’t say that it
helped me much, but it was from her that I learned a few things to practice in
order to boost my confidence. One of those tricks, and the one that stuck with
me the longest, was holding my head up when I walked into a room and repeating
to myself how much I was worth. I often pretended that I was a queen, like the
ones I read about in my books. I also got more into writing, which was a wonderful
outlet for me. Although I was still as jittery as a spooked horse when I had to
go out among people, it was, for the most part, a relaxing year. Then, I went
back to school and had to put all I had learned to the test.
Tenth grade wasn’t terrible. My diary entries from this time
still have a generous sprinkling of my naturally happy-go-lucky nature in its
tone, most notably in the way almost everything ends in an exclamation point. I
enjoyed my small class, which was now free of the middle-school bully. During
the long schooldays I was still quiet, but in a way that was content and not
fearful, and in delight I could feel myself slowly but surely creeping out of
my shell. I was pushing myself to be more friendly and open, and I had even
made friends with some upper-classmen who treated me like a little sister. I
had no close friends, but I had plenty of people I enjoyed being around.
Then eleventh grade hit me like a ton of bricks. More
specifically, it felt like a ton of bricks with inch-long spikes covering them.
I mostly try to block this year from my memory, because it was one of my
hardest to endure to date. That was the year I could feel depression and anxiety
descending on me like an ink-black cloud, stealing away my happiness and the
small, scraped-together confidence I had slowly been acquiring. I can’t blame
it on one thing, but rather on a myriad of things. For one, I had braces, and
anybody who has experienced braces knows that they do nothing for your self-image.
I also had horrifying acne, for which I got put on some heavy-duty medicine.
This medicine, in addition to messing with my hormones and emotions, dried up
my face and my lips so badly that every day after lunch, because my chap stick
had worn off, I would have to spend several minutes in the bathroom trying to
get rid of the dead skin that had suddenly sprang upon my lips and the food
that had gotten caught in my braces. In a word, it was terrible. I was scared
to smile at anybody for fear I would look funny. I tried to weave a cloak of
invisibility around myself in order to hide from the world.
In addition, I felt as if I had no friends. Anybody who has
gone through high school knows the subtle social shifts that occur on almost a
daily basis. Unfortunately, because of my personality, I tend to notice these
shifts in intense detail. I notice everything. In the words of my favorite OCD
detective, “It’s a gift… And a curse.” And that year, something shifted in our
class. Whereas before, I had felt at least somewhat a part of the circle that
was our small class, something happened to change all of that: we got a new
person. The scales of order tipped crazily, and when it was all over, the girls
in my class flocked to this new figure and formed a tight circle and I was left
out in the cold. I felt as if everyone was drifting away from me, and I was
still silently standing right where they had left me, trying to call out, but
held back by the voices that had been haunting me my entire life: “Let them go,
they don’t care about you.” “Why should they want you in their circle? You’re
boring.” “They don’t like you because you’re too quiet. They think you don’t
like them. They don’t want to be near you.” Sadly, I chose to listen to the
voices and the lies. These voices were compounded when I found a new friend,
somebody I looked up to and enjoyed, and they too chose to leave me behind
while they moved onto somebody new.
I was scared. I was confused. And I was alone. I buried my
nose in books and tried to ignore the world around me. I knew that I should
feel happy, and that I should try harder and talk more, but I couldn’t. I had
built up a wall around myself, to protect myself, and a wall blocks out
everything. I couldn’t reach out, and people couldn’t reach in, to either hurt
me or help me.
But don’t worry, reader. That was my low point, and every
night, no matter now starless, turns into day eventually. The summer after my
junior year, I went to summer camp and managed to reclaim some of my lost joy
and confidence. Verses like “The joy of the Lord is my strength,” and
reassurance in God’s grace and undying love for me, naturally pushed me to open
up more. I had a strong desire to touch other people’s lives and I couldn’t do
that from behind my wall. I took small chances at first, saying “Hello” to people
I passed, practicing my small-talk conversations, and smiling more. I still
felt out-of-place and, at times, ignored in my own class, but I found friends
who eventually became very important to me. I managed to get through, and even
enjoy, events such as homecoming and graduation. In playing basketball, I found
aggression I didn’t know I possessed in my soft and timid nature. Things were
finally going my way!
I suppose you know what comes next: college. In case you
haven’t grasped it yet, change isn’t exactly something I enjoy. I tend to seek
out comfort and security, and I was moving to a new place with new people I had
never met before. It was not at all a comfortable or secure situation, and I
was worried. Excited too, of course, but my fear sank in deeply soon after the
excitement wore off. Although they weren’t as strong as they had been junior
year, I still had all of those lies and whispered doubts floating around in my
head. This low self-esteem was compounded by the fact that I was shy, quiet,
and somewhat boring, and I had been given as a roommate one of the most
vivacious, outspoken, and colorful people I have ever had the pleasure of being
acquainted with. Truth be told, she scared the heck out of my when I first met
her. I didn’t know how to handle all of her extroverted qualities. Since we had
all of the same classes and lived together, I ended up doing most everything
with her, but instead of helping, at first it just made things worse. She was
everything I had admired and wanted to be: fun, energetic, not afraid to speak
her mind, and good at making friends with strangers. It made me hate myself
even more, as I wondered why I couldn’t just be like her. At the risk of
sounding pathetic, while she was out with her gaggle of new friends, I would be
sitting in the room crying and again feeling left out and alone.
However, as time went by, we grew closer. I still held
myself at a distance, but felt myself being inexplicably drawn into a close
bond with my extremely different roommate. I knew in my heart that she was the
person I had cried and prayed for so many nights, the best friend I had always
wanted. We found that we had similar likes and tastes in movies and music,
laughed late into the night when we should have been studying or sleeping, helped
each other with our problems, and spent so much time together that eventually I
found myself pouring out some of my deep, dark, hidden fears to her. And
instead of telling me I needed to change, that I needed to be more or that I
was wrong, she simply encouraged me. She told me that I was funny, and
beautiful, and strong, and that she enjoyed my company. I had never thought
such things about myself. And she challenged me. Not in a way that said my
quietness was a detriment, because she had grown to see that as a good thing,
and helped me to see it too. There is beauty and strength in being quiet in a
world that is overrun with noise. She also helped me to see that there is a
time for everything, and there is also a time for speaking up. It wasn’t an
easy lesson for me. All of the lies in my head and all of the habits I had
formed were ingrained into me, and I wore them like a protective skin. That
just doesn’t come off easily. For anybody who has read the C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of
the Chronicles of Narnia series,
there is a certain part that can beautifully picture this process. Eustace is a
mean, snarky, greedy boy who winds up in Narnia, and in his greed he ends up
being turned into a dragon. Eventually, he learns his lesson, and is ready to
be turned back into a boy. Aslan, the lion, leads him to a well and tells
Eustace to take off his dragon skin and step into the pool. Eustace tries to peel away his dragon scales
but to little avail; finally, Aslan steps in. “’The very first tear he made was
so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began
pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only
thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel
off. You know - if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like
billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.’”
When one evening I broke down and angrily shared my thoughts
that I never had anything good to say, that I was tired of fighting with myself
constantly to not be afraid, and that I hated how I would have to fight this
battle for the rest of my life, my roommate shared a piece of wisdom that has
never left me, and still resonates with me to this day. “You do have something to
say,” she said. “You have the Gospel, the best news that anybody can ever have,
and you can’t hold it in yourself. That’s something that has to be shared.”
Those words were like the claws of Aslan, going straight to my heart and
tearing in a way that was both cruel and pleasant. Over the years I had been
slowly uncovering my lies and doubts, but it was that night that I finally
somehow gained the strength to push them away from me, and ignore them. After
all, what is more important than the Gospel? I had been entrusted with such an
important thing, and there was no excuse for me not to share it with anybody
who would listen. After that conversation, I made decisions. I got
accountability. I felt the joy come creeping back into my life, a joy I felt as
if I had lost a long time beforehand, and for a while it was as if I couldn’t
keep my mouth shut. I wanted to laugh and make people laugh. I wanted to share
and enjoy, and I was doing it. I had no time to listen to the voices in my
head. I still don’t.
My roommate left the year after that. It was hard, but I
knew that she hadn’t wanted to leave me. Our separation had a quality of peace
to it. We were still the best of friends, and I was confident in that. Over the
next few years of college, I had hard times and challenges. I spent many nights
crying because I could feel the lies beating on the door of my heart,
challenging me, pounding my shaky confidence with the force of their brutality.
I would sometimes fall. But I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and started
over the next day. In the words of Mary Anne Radmacher, “Courage does not
always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,
‘I will try again tomorrow.’” I chose not to look back, and to keep going. I
still struggle, almost daily, but I have come to accept myself for who I am,
with all of my quirks and strengths and weaknesses. I know that I am not
perfect, but I do not believe that I am worthless. Especially thanks to the
Gospel of Christ, who shed his blood for me and rose again, I have a beauty and
confidence that this world cannot touch.
In the end, my journey was filled with many things. There
was an enemy to be fought, in the form of the whispered lies which I had
welcomed into my head and chose to believe. There was a person to be rescued,
the free and confident person who has emerged from those lies and who is able
to tell this story. There was an element of regret, because I know that there
were things I could have done differently, things I could have cared about less,
and people I could have held onto more. But above all, this story is one of
release and courage. It took me many years to build up the nerve to fight my
invisible monsters, but I didn’t come to this place alone. It took the love of
someone who accepted me for me, but didn’t let me stay where I was, to push me
forward. And now, like Bilbo from The
Hobbit, one of my favorite characters of all time, I can step out from my
hobbit hole into the wide world, ready for adventure and whatever comes my way.
