I Used to Fear People. Now I Write About Them.

You know that feeling when you’re talking to someone — an acquaintance, a stranger, a colleague, even a new friend — and your mind races at full speed, scrambling for the perfect response? You want to sound witty, cool, or at least coherent, but the words stumble out in stutters, sometimes with odd intonations or mispronunciations, leaving you feeling like a complete mess. Your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your breathing goes shallow, and eye contact feels like a challenge you weren’t prepared for. And the whole time, you’re convinced the other person is quietly judging you.

Welcome to the everyday life of someone with social anxiety. This is my life. And the lives of many others who would never openly admit it.

(A quick note: Social anxiety disorder is a real clinical condition affecting around 7% of the U.S. population and can lead to extreme avoidance of social situations. While I don’t have a formal diagnosis, social anxiety has shaped my life in ways I’m still unpacking.)

For as long as I can remember, being around people felt like something I had to survive rather than enjoy. In grade school, I deliberately avoided my peers, feeling angsty and deeply misunderstood. I was happiest alone, where I didn’t have to think about how I was coming across.

Being homeschooled during my pre-teen years only made things worse. At an age when most kids were developing social skills through daily interaction, I was retreating further into myself, shrinking away from the very opportunities that might have helped.

By 18, I felt ready to take on adulthood in almost every way except one. My social anxiety was crippling. While other young people were out building new relationships and finding their footing in the world, I was quietly keeping people at a distance. I had a small circle of carefully chosen friends, but for the most part, I still chose solitude over connection.

The Moment I Realized I Needed People

It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was 23, that everything shifted. A messy divorce. Quarantine. The kind of isolation that strips everything away and leaves you with nothing but yourself. I remember being curled up on the floor in tears, and realizing for the first time just how desperately I needed other people. Not just wanted. Needed.

But putting myself out there didn’t make the anxiety disappear. My heart still raced. My words still stumbled. That familiar, creeping awkwardness was always right there. I kept asking myself: how do you act calm and confident when you feel like a mess on the inside? How do you stop caring so much about what everyone else thinks? For anyone who hasn’t experienced social anxiety firsthand, it is genuinely hard to explain how consuming it can be.

A Common Misconception

There’s a persistent myth about people with social anxiety: that we avoid social situations because we prefer to be alone. That couldn’t be further from the truth, at least not for me. I craved connection just as much as anyone else, sometimes more. The need to belong, to be accepted, to be seen, runs deep. It’s precisely because I cared so much about how I was perceived that my self-consciousness became paralyzing. The fear of saying the wrong thing, of being judged or rejected, was enough to keep me from reaching out at all.

This creates an exhausting internal tension. On one side, a longing for companionship. On the other, an anxiety that whispers you won’t be enough, that you’ll fall short, that people will see through you and find you lacking. That clash between wanting to belong and fearing you won’t be accepted is what makes social anxiety so complex and so often misunderstood.

At some point, I got tired of letting fear make my decisions for me.

What I Actually Did About It

I decided the only way forward was to get uncomfortable on purpose. A little self-imposed exposure therapy, if you will.

I started by seeking out social connections even when everything in me resisted. I learned to stop fighting my own awkwardness and start owning it. The truth is, people tend to like you more when you’re genuine and a little unpolished. Realness is disarming.

I also had to shift how I saw other people. I have a tendency toward cynicism, fixating on people’s flaws as a way of keeping them at a distance. But I slowly learned that warmth and magnetism aren’t personality traits you’re born with. They’re things you practice.

Then came the harder work: changing how I saw myself. Did I feel unworthy of other people’s attention? Absolutely. But I’ve come to understand that how we see ourselves gets projected outward. Confidence isn’t something you wait to feel before acting on it. You act confident, and over time, you grow into it.

And finally, the most clichéd piece of advice that also happens to be true: stop caring so much about what other people think. The moment you stop centering your energy on how you’re being perceived, you free up space to actually be present. To enjoy the conversation. To enjoy the person in front of you.

My social anxiety hasn’t disappeared. I don’t think it ever fully will. But somewhere along the way, my fascination with human connection stopped being a source of fear and became a field of study. It’s part of why I became a writer. With a background in psychology, I’ve spent years exploring what drives us as individuals, why we think and act the way we do, and how we navigate life as a deeply social species. Because here’s what I know to be true: life is almost nothing without other people. To truly thrive, we need meaningful connection just as much as we need food, water, or sleep.

“Happiness Only Real When Shared”

If you haven’t read Into the Wild, I’d recommend it. The book follows the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who abandons society to seek freedom and peace in the Alaskan wilderness. He gets what he was looking for, and then discovers it isn’t enough. In his final days, he scrawled a note in the margin of a Tolstoy novel: “Happiness only real when shared.”

That line has stayed with me. It captures something I had to learn the hard way. Isolation can feel like a refuge, but real joy, real fulfillment, comes from our relationships with others. An unshared happiness isn’t really happiness at all. McCandless figured that out too late. I’m still working on it.