More Esteem Please

Low self esteem is something that I have been developing as a result of falling back into my social phobia ways. I feel as though I am incapable of the normal things that other people can do. Like hold down a job. I can't even imagine what it would be like to have a job that I go to on a daily basis at this point. It's been 2 years since I've held my last steady job, and every day since then has been a struggle. I can't seem to understand how so many people can just have jobs so easily, yet here I am with absolutely nothing. It's terrible and it's making me feel worse about myself.

I used to have more confidence. Even when I was younger I felt good about myself despite the fact that I couldn't talk to other people. I still liked the person that I was. Now I'm not so sure anymore. I had some friends that I tried to hold on to from college. But as time goes on I even seem to lose confidence about how they feel about me. I think things like, "why in the world would they want to spend time with me when they probably have so many other interesting things to do." and this keeps me from ever making plans with anyone. It helps that they never initiate spending time with me either, so that makes me feel like that's just confirmation of my feelings. Man, life has been pretty crap lately. I just have to keep pushing through.

Reading Time

Because I am dealing with some minor social anxiety issues, I know that I have issues with speaking. One of my biggest problems is the ability to talk slowly and clearly. I usually spit out my words very quickly and make no sense and jumble up all my woods. Because I know that I speak this way, I have the tendency to fear speaking since I worry about other people not being able to understand me. What I've found is that one way to improve the way that I speak is to read aloud more often. Whenever I have the time alone in my home to do this, I will pick a book and read aloud from it for about a half an hour.

This probably sounds really silly, but I have noticed that there is a significant difference in the way I enunciate and pronounce words after doing this for about a month. I am more conscious of the way I speak, and I feel a bit less nervous about speaking to other people since I know my manner of speaking has improved some.

So what better way to help improve myself than to read aloud from some books written for people who struggle with being socially inept? I figure if I am going to spend so much time reading out loud, I may as well read out loud from some books that will help improve me even further. The link I posted has some great book recommendations. I've already read one of the books on the list and it was really good. I'll probably pick up another one sometime this week!

Here we go

I've always struggled with social anxiety. Ever since I was a kid, I knew I was different because I wasn't able to make friends with people as easily as other kids were. In fact the very thought of even making other friends was terrifying to me, and not something that I was particularly interested in because of it. I struggled with this all through my life. It continued intuit high school, where it was the worst of all. Being a teenager is bad enough. I was already struggling with all sorts of hormonal problems and self confidence issues. Add a sprinkle of social anxiety on top of that and you have someone who went through four entire years of high school without making a single friend. There was no one who I could relate to, or share my issues with. It was a really hard time in my Life

I started to improve once I got back into college. At this point, I was still afraid of interacting with others, but I had my first job, which essentially forced me to be social since it involved communicating with lots of people on a daily basis. Then I forced myself even further by joining clubs and putting myself out into the world socially. I would say college was the thing that helped improved me the most.

But then I graduated. I moved back home and I have been having a lot of trouble finding a steady job ever since. As a result, I've fallen back into my socially anxious ways. It's not great, but that's where I am right now. So now I am trying once again to shake the feeling and take my life back. I figured blogging about my journey would be a good place to start. So here I am, trying to beat my social anxiety slowly, day by day.