When I was a kid, I was a fervent nailbiter. I chewed those things off until they started bleeding. My mom tried many things to get me to stop, including painting them with a specific transparent nailpolish, of which the chemical taste should discourage me from biting on them. Think that helped? Nope. After a while, I just started liking the taste.
At some point, I solved my nailbiting problem by just cutting my nails really short. So short that it’s impossible to get a grip on them with my teeth. Great! Right? But the problem isn’t really gone. Whenever my nails get a little bit longer, I start getting a feeling of discomfort under them. It feels like there’s dirt under the nails and I have to dig it out and get rid of it. I constantly fiddle with my fingers, trying to get rid of the dirt, even when there’s none there. The imaginary dirt makes me so nervous that I have to cut the nails as soon as possible. The feeling of relief when I chop those fuckers off is amazing.
So, the solution it seems is just to keep my nails really short right? Sure, except that it’s not my only nervous tic. For one, I still pick my boogers whenever I feel like there’s a buildup. I cannot stand the feeling of having snot up there. When it’s wet, I collect it all together, and when it’s dry, I scrape it off with the little bit of fingernail I still have left. And what am I supposed to do then? Wipe it on my clothes? That’s disgusting. Honestly, I feel like wiping it on my clothes is more disgusting than what I usually do: just put them in my mouth. It’s recycling!
I’m quite ashamed of my nose picking, and it does hurt my self image whenever I do it, especially in public. I get quite anxious whenever I do it. And maybe that’s a signal to stop doing it, sure! But I don’t know how.
By far the worst of all my nervous tics is my lip biting. I chew and I chew and I chew and I chew until there’s nothing left. When the skin starts growing back, it’s patchy and dry, and I can’t resist the temptation to keep pulling off the dead skin, ripping the new growth with it. Sometimes, my lips start bleeding. It takes weeks to heal usually, and I’m relieved whenever it finally does. But it doesn’t take much to start biting again. The worst part is that if I destroy my lips when I’m exhausted and a bit sick, and my immune system falters, I get cold sores. Did you know that cold sores are literally herpes? Just like when I eat my boogers, it comes with so much shame when other people can see that I have an STD on my lips. And it comes at the worst times! Whenever I’m on vacation, spending a week around strangers, and there’s always a pretty girl between those strangers, my anxiety peaks and I start biting. Halfway through the week, my lips are destroyed, and then, when I think I’ve finally made enough moves to be able to kiss the pretty girl, my world falls apart: a fucking cold sore appears on my lips and laughs in my face when I’m looking in the mirror. You have no idea how many times I have been cockblocked by my own immune system.
It took me a while to realize, but all of these nervous tics are part of a larger problem. I have anxiety. I don’t know if I have enough of it for it to be diagnosed as a disorder, but I have enough of it to be a problem. I didn’t really think much of it, but sometimes I get a throbbing feeling in my whole body, it feels like I have to puke and poop and scream at the same time. Like I’m not getting enough air, but at the same time I’m inflated like a big ass balloon that’s about to pop. Other times I’m around people I don’t really know but would like to get better, but I don’t know how to connect with them, and even the thought of approaching them feels so exhausting that I just go home and wallow in my loneliness.
I’m also going through a diagnosis process for ADHD and autism, because of my problems with procrastination and social interactions. Maybe the reason I can’t sit behind the computer and write or edit that video because the thought of it not being good enough is so overwhelming. Or maybe my anxiety is the result of ADHD or autism or high giftedness or childhood trauma. Either way, I need to fucking deal with it. I don’t know if it will go away when I change something or if I will experience it for the rest of my life, but I need to learn to fucking deal with it.
Sometimes I think to myself, “You can’t have anxiety, think about all the crazy shit you’ve done in front of strangers and on the internet? How can you claim to have anxiety when you’ve conciously embarassed yourself so much?”. But then I remember how difficult it was for me to do those things, how much fear I felt and how much I had to get over it to start doing it. And then I think about how somehow, with all that fear, somehow, it’s still easier than just talking to a person and putting myself in a vulnerable position with them. Sometimes it’s so difficult to tell a person I like them, to ask them for help, to share my emotions with them. Somehow, it’s so much easier to just put on a persona and do something wild in front of a bunch of strangers than to actually be my true self. It’s easy to risk rejection and public humiliation when you do something so wildly embarassing that it’s guaranteed to provoke that reaction. It’s easy to get over that feeling. It’s much harder to show a hidden part of yourself that you’re deeply ashamed of. Because when you show yourself and someone rejects you, they confirm that hidden disgust that was lingering within yourself, and it’s devastating.
And worse, when someone uses something you’re ashamed of against you, and publicly humiliates you, that anxiety never goes away. When you are constantly around people who know stuff about you, and the smallest misstep could lead to them exposing it, you never really learn to trust people. When you finally get comfortable and start trusting people, but then your past comes back to chase you, it destroys what little self-confidence you have left. You can spend your whole life living that way. Anxious and repressed. Constantly acting out. Trying to be seen for who you are, but people always seeing you through that filter that highlights your worst features.
Leaving high school was transformative for me for me. The people that kept me on edge 24/7 were out of my life. I experienced joy, friendship, trust, love, seemingly for the first time. I was ecstatic. All of a sudden, the dark clouds that followed me wherever I went disappeared. I felt liberated.
But my anxiety didn’t really go away, did it? It laid dormant, coming out every now and then to fuck shit up and knock me down. It’s an ongoing battle that I fight every day, and it’s easy to lose to it. I didn’t even know I was fighting it until recently. Becoming aware of it is probably one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. It’s amazing to know when you’re feeling anxious and to be able to choosing your response rather than just giving into your fear and retreating. It doesn’t work yet most of the time, but I can work on that.
One of the tricks that has helped me a lot is to acknowledge my anxiety publicly. When I’m in a new social situation and I don’t feel comfortable, sometimes, it feels liberating to just tell people I have social anxiety. It increases my confidence. Just blurt it out. The people who react negatively to that are not worth being in your life. Their emotional ineptness is not something you need in your life anyway, and when they react negatively, you can be confident knowing that they are not worth your time. When you are rejected, instead of feeling ashamed and unworthy, feel ANGRY! Angry that these people misinterpret your vulnerability for weakness, and pity their emotional ineptness and ignorance. Let that fury feed your confidence instead of letting your anxiety feed off of your shame. And then cut them out of your life.
I have found that most people don’t even react negatively when you tell them you’re anxious! Anyone with even the slightest sense of empathy will ask you what’s bothering you, and sometimes (not always), they really care. Those are the people you need in your life, the ones that will help you turn that anxiety into excitement, who will help you overcome your fears and take what’s yours from life. I have some people like that in my life, but I want many more of them, and I will dedicate my life to finding them.
If you’re still reading this, I hope this helped you in some way. I really went deep here but I’m also glad at where I arrived. Putting this post out there and displaying myself publicly feels scary, but I’m gonna do it anyways.
Feel free to tweet me or DM me on instagram (both @LiamVereecken) if you want to share something of yourself or if you have something that can help me out.