This is probably going to be a long post. I've had social anxiety since a traumatic childhood experience (I was 10/11 at the time). I've spent the last few months trying to unravel all of this and understand it enough to start moving past it. For background, I'm 27, male, American, my parents have been divorced since I was a baby, I was raised by my father, I was diagnosed with ADHD a year ago (which comes with its own problems that have been mostly sorted out through medication), I have a few close friends, and I've never been in a relationship. I'm just going to go through this in order, explaining what I've figured out about how my experiences affected me, and then explain where I am now. I also want to say up front that I'm in a very good place right now and I'm just having trouble knowing how to move forward from here.

I guess I'll start with the traumatic experience. When I was 10, one of my childhood friends thought it would be funny to start a rumor that my dad molested him. His parents called the police, my dad was arrested, and I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle. That lasted for a few months before they decided to move to a different state. I stayed behind and I was put in a foster facility. As a child, I was very open and trusting and those traits quickly turned into vulnerabilities in that environment. I could go into details, but I think it's easy enough to imagine how fucked up it was to live with 50-100 angry, traumatized children/teens. On top of that, I had no idea when or if I was going home. It could have been in a day, a month, or never, nobody could give me any answers, and getting stuck in that feeling of total uncertainty was its own issue (that I've gotten past now). I was there for the better part of a year before my dad's trial was over and he got custody back, but it was long enough for me to stop trusting people.

I went to middle school right after that and struggled with those issues for most of it. I was quiet and tended to avoid everyone in 6th grade. Fortunately, that isn't my natural personality at all and I was able to find ways of pushing past the constant barrage of anxious thoughts to be myself again, although not as much as I wanted to. Before all of this, I was always extroverted and tried to be the center of attention and make friends with everyone I met, and I found some of that again in 7th grade. I started to become a bit of a class clown, started trying to make friends (even though I wasn't comfortable when people tried to reciprocate and get close to me), and by 8th grade I was a lot more like myself on the outside. Even though the anxiety was still there on the inside, I was fighting it and it didn't feel like my own thoughts anymore. I have a specific memory of the last few days of 8th grade, after all of the testing was done and everyone could just relax, where I didn't feel anxious at all. I remember looking forward to coming back to school next year. I was getting past it. And then my dad decided to move me to another school.

It wasn't really his fault. I was 14 and didn't know how to explain why I needed to stay and why the friends I had made were so important to me. My grades sucked (ADHD is a bitch) and he thought he was doing what was best for me. It was so hard for me to get to the point where I didn't feel anxious anymore and looking back at three exhausting years of struggling with it was too much for me to be able to do it again. I stopped fighting and ended up with depression through highschool, my late teens, and most of my 20's. About 13 years in total. I isolated myself, convinced myself that I didn't need other people, and made excuses to keep everyone at a distance. I came out of it about 3 months ago thanks to someone who insisted on being friends with me in spite of all my efforts against it. They recently went through a personal tragedy and I've always been the type of person who will do anything for my friends. I couldn't just not be there for them and it felt good to let myself get close to someone. I saw what I was missing by avoiding my anxiety and that gave me a reason to fight it again.

So I've been working through understanding this for three months now. It helps that I've been working on the problems that I could see through the depression so I have a lot of experience with introspection and improving myself. I used to have OCPD and I started to see it and fix it years ago. I think I've managed to undo most of the damage that I did while depressed. It's been a long three months. It didn't help that I never thought of myself as socially anxious, I just thought of it as introversion. I have social skills and I like socializing, but it stresses me out. Now I realize that it stresses me out because of the anxiety. I've spent the past few weeks paying more attention to my anxiety level and trying to get better at managing it. I started seriously looking into social anxiety about a week ago and found an article on high-functioning social anxiety that described exactly how I feel. I usually try to change the way I approach things or think about things so I'll be less anxious, but the anxiety is still there and there are still things I can't do because of it.

Having accepted that I have social anxiety, I was able to see it a lot more clearly. The next day at work, I happened to be paying attention to my anxiety level as I walked in and I felt myself go from relaxed to slightly on guard. Like that part of my brain that says "this is dangerous, be alert" clicked on as soon as I got around other people. The thing is, it felt normal, like it was always part of my mood around others but I had been tuning it out. Once I recognized it, I was able to calm back down. I kept watching out for that feeling throughout the day and calming myself down again when it came up and I didn't have any anxious thoughts all day. Usually they're constantly coming up and I have to push past them in every social interaction but I never knew where they came from. Like I said, they stopped feeling like my own thoughts some time in 8th grade and that hasn't changed. So yeah, this feels like a good start. I haven't been able to do it every day, and more stressful social situations still cause too much anxiety for me to be able to control, but I'm doing it.

You've made it to the last paragraph. Thanks for reading this far. My problem right now is that I'm ready to be done with this but I'm not sure how to finish it. I finally feel like I'm in control of it and I just need to put myself in enough situations where I can practice letting go of that feeling and it will be gone for good. I just don't know how to start with that and it's making me feel very impatient. I've spent so long avoiding socializing and now I want to just floor it, go hypersocial for a while, and leave this all behind, but I'm at a loss on how to do that and my friends aren't generally the going out types. I've been using Meetup, but I don't have anxiety with those types of events because the point is to socialize. Its too easy to rationalize my way around the anxiety instead of confronting it and taking back control. Any advice?