About Me

I’ll start with the labels because those are easy. I’m Socially Anxious, Introverted, and Highly Sensitive. I suffer from Depression, and I Binge Eat to get out of those depressions. Officially, I’ve been diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder and Cyclothymia. That’s me, and that’s why I’m here. But let’s step back. Being a human, I have an innate, intrinsic worth. I’m much more than just the sum of my parts. I’m the emotions and feelings found deep in my intuition, and my rational and irrational thoughts, too. The sum of my experiences–my past–create meaning in the present. They are me. That said, this blog is a collection of thoughts. It’s a snapshot of who I am in the moment. It’s the memories and emotions and feelings from my past, written because of my anxiety and depression.

Intellect aside, I’m 27 years old as of Fall 2010. I’m from Kansas City, and after a brief stint in New York, I’m currently living in San Francisco. I enjoy traveling, reading, writing, and exercising. I’m a vegetarian, and I care deeply about the world. I love everyone in it, because deep down, I know that everyone is the same: we all want to be happy and free from suffering. It’s that simple. I quit my job almost a year ago (August 2009) to pursue a graduate degree in Library and Information Science. It’s an online program through San Jose State University. And, yes, I know I can do more than be a librarian with that degree, but I want to be a librarian. I’m passionate about information, because with the right social, economic, and political information, people can make informed decisions, bettering their lives. Libraries make this happen.

I’ve been struggling with social anxiety for as long as I can remember but I’ve really only been conscious of it the past four or five years. The anxiety creates the depression: anticipatory anxiety leads to anxiety which leads to depression which leads back to anticipatory anxiety. As of writing, I’m employing a number of different interventions to help ease the anxiety and subsequent depression. Talk therapy, hypnotherapy, yoga, meditation, writing, to name a few.

This blog spawns from another blog. In a sense, my blogging philosophy has changed. In my last blog, I felt it was necessary to post everything that happened. A stream of consciousness. At first, this worked great. Sharing with the world everything that happened in the life of a socially anxious-depressive-binge eating individual seemed necessary. I stirred up emotions that had never been touched. In reality, this lead to emotional burnout and fatigue, eventually leading to depression after depression after depression. I no longer feel it’s necessary to post everything; I just want to share something—something substantial and profound. In therapy, as much as I’d like to, I can’t share everything. It’s not the point. The point is to open up about some things and analyze what happens inside, in the moment, in hopes to name the inner experiences. I’m applying that same logic to this blog: I don’t hope to share everything, but I do hope to share some significant things in order to name my experience in the hopes that you can relate to it.

Finally, and perhaps more importantly, this is a place for me to be myself–and that’s probably the hardest thing. I spend most of my life trying to be someone I’m not. Here, I can be who I really am, and my hope is that, through this blog, the person I truly am, can grow, so I can become myself more and more outside this blog, in real life.

Thanks for reading.