By: Joel Donato Ching Jacob
Amy asked why I felt that I wanted to meet
with her. I answered, “I wanted to meet with you because I do not want to meet
with you.”
I didn’t know it then, but I have social
anxiety. I am not sure how it feels for other people I can only relay how it
feels for me. It does feel like I was going crazy because I get upset over
conflicting fears. I get overwhelmed with fears of missing out but I am also
afraid of people. I dislike interacting with people. Some of my friends find it
hard to get on board with the idea; maybe I did too at the start. I can be
loud. I can be fun. I am the guy you can expect to call for the waiter at the
restaurant or to ask for the manager if we had complaints in a venue. I love
dancing in the clubs. I am not the least bit shy, so social anxiety seemed like
the least of my problems.
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| Illustration by Isaac Brines |
But I was also very flaky. I would agree to go
to events and I would be ready but I would cancel at the last minute. The idea
of interacting with other people made me uncomfortable. At work, when people come
to my desk with requests, I would ask them to go back to their desks to send me
an email instead; I have made up a very real and valid excuse that I am
forgetful and that if I were busy, I can queue their requests on my inbox. But
I did not want to be talking with my co-workers. It got so bad that some of my
friends have stopped asking me out because there was no point; I was not going
to arrive. I am often late for work because I need to build up the courage to
interact with other people.
The desperation to seek help finally arrived
when the UP Feb Fair was going to be held a few blocks from my workplace and
the idea of tens of thousands of people freaked me out to the point of
indigestion and sleeplessness. Amy is a psychiatrist and she was going to be my
therapist for the next 8. My first session was spent making introductions and
instructions on how to maintain a mood diary where I was going to track my
anxiety events, thoughts during the event, feelings during the event, and most
importantly, I had to write down physiological observations as I went through
the event, like if I was short of breath, or physically agitated in any other
way.
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| Illustration by Isaac Brines |
I pace. I probably could have walked from SM
North to UP Diliman with the pacing I do in the parking lot over a week. I
don’t keep a pedometer because I am sure I can knock any step goals out of the
park. But in staffing ours, my away-from-desk time is not looking admirable. In
an exercise, Amy asked me to report about a moment of extreme stress and what
could go wrong. I was like “Talaga lang? (Oh,really?) Are you challenging me?” So I spent an
entire hour telling her how horrible malls were and how I imagine stuff like
fires, martilyo (hammer) gang attacks, terrorist bombings that would result in
zombie-apocalypse-level stampedes. I transitioned into an actual zombie
apocalypse scenario because I was soon explaining how I spent most of my time
in malls imagining how to escape from zombies. At some point after, I talked
about disease transmission by droplets, bodily contact, or by air. Malls are
death traps. Near the end of our eight sessions, Amy gave a bit of advice and I
wrote it down word for word because I knew it was going to change my life:
Avoidance causes anxiety because it keeps you from the position to create
positive change whereas, even with failure, action is anchored on hope.
I have become paralyzed by things that I
should do right. I have expectations of how to behave to impress my friends
when they never verbalized those expectations of me. So I end up flaking out on
opportunities to be a friend to them. I have this idealized self that presented
himself as a distinguished co-worker that I can never live up to so I just gave
up and stopped interacting with my officemates. Malls are still death traps.
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| Illustration by Isaac Brines |
Does interacting with people still freak me
out? You bet. I hate it! But now I do my best to follow through because I want
to have hope. I had lost hope in myself and I had to regain that. Do I still
flake out? Yes. Do I still panic in public? Yes. But do I hope to get better?
Yes. I sought help.
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Joel Donato Ching Jacob is called Cupkeyk by
friends. He is the 2018 winner of the Scholastic Asian Book Award; Wing of the
Locust is coming out later this year. Cupkeyk is also a 2019 Editors Choice
Awardee for The Best Asian Short Stories for “Artifacts from the Parent.” He
lives in Bay, Laguna with his mother and two dogs. He likes hiking up
mountains, lifting weights, and eating out. Follow him on Twitter or IG:
@chimeracupkeyk
