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Avoidance of social interactions and intimate relationships. Excessive feelings of low self-esteem, shame and inadequacy. Withdrawal from situations where one is likely to be criticized. Hypersensitivity to rejection. These are just some of the traits of Avoidant Personality Disorder. But it goes beyond just anxiety or shyness.

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Social anxiety is the debilitating fear that freezes me halfway through a sentence, that makes me clam up and turns my pumping blood into hot lava.

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In general, introverts are not afraid of interacting with others; they simply prefer to spend time alone.

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  Being someone who I shouldn’t be is wrong and honestly it took me a lot of time to realize it. Shame on me. I wanted to be noticed, I don’t know why.

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To be honest I’m not quite sure if you were even looking at me or looking through me. I don’t know you that well after all. Maybe you just like to stare at empty spaces and mistook me for one.

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As much as it sucks, I truly believe that our anxiety might just be filtering out the people who wouldn’t be good for us anyway.

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Let me be the first to tell you I wish I wasn’t like this. But I’ve come to learn that there are some parts to ourselves we can’t choose.

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Contrary to popular belief, Social Anxiety Disorder (referred to as SAD for the rest of this article) isn’t a trend, or something that should be romanticized on social media everywhere.

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For those of us with generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, or some other nasty cousin of those, we freak out about stuff that isn’t…possible. Stuff that is hard to understand sometimes. We get that. But it doesn’t change the heaviness of what we feel.

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One of my earliest childhood memories was when I was five. I was brought one day to see a child psychiatrist. Oh, don’t worry, I wasn’t much of a “problem child”.