#socialanxiety 

Barbecue at the home of close relatives. I've never attended but they insist and I'm sorry to say no. My mother and brother, even though they say I'm "embarrassing", want me to go. My husband loves this kind of social life.
Anticipatory anxiety for days, fear that everything is not in order. I spend hours and hours cleaning so as not to make our family look bad, but I am in anguish  for every speck of dust, every cobweb, every blade of overgrown grass. If I lived in a palace, I would be ashamed of the faded frescoes.
I take a tranquilizer the night before, hoping to get away with it. I arrive at the crime scene and I feel worse with each passing moment. Then I hear the bell ring and I understand that the first guests are arriving (there are twenty-one people in all). I bathe in sweat, my knees tremble, my stomach thumps like a roller coaster. My mother says, "But don't you even want me tointroduce you?"
No, I don't want anything, I don't want to see those faces of "normal" people, I don't want to talk to anyone, I don't want to compliment unfamiliar children, I don't want to get tangled up in speeches of circumstance and pleasantries. As people enter, I escape, I go from room to room to avoid them, so as not to even have to say hello. If there is a guest in the living room, I go to the kitchen, if I see someone on the porch, I go into the bathroom. I'm looking for something to keep my hands busy, I peel the garlic, I salt the fish with my head down.
Then comes the time to eat, in the confusion of the barbecue where everyone cooks what they have brought from home, I can't find a place, I don't know where to sit, my stomach is closed, nauseated, my head is spinning, I drink glasses of wine to appease an anxiety that does not subside, that magnifies. I didn't break the ice right away and therefore I don't break it any more, I haven't introduced myself to the group, into the conversation, and therefore I can't do it anymore when everyone is there joking and eating sweets that taste like cardboard to me. I put on a teasing, unpleasant face, I take the piss out of everything and everyone, openly, I chat with my husband making me hateful. That's what I do best, it's the only thing I'm good at. I can't stand the shouting, the noises, the young mothers talking about their children, everything gets confused in my mind like a tidal wave that overwhelms me. Flee flee flee.
I sneak into an upstairs room and stay there all day, until it's time to say goodbye, curled up on the bed to sleep, letting the voices drift away, don't invade my living space, don't block my breath on the diaphragm. Whether they notice my absence or not, I don't care.
I feel a sense of defeat and a violent anger, towards all those who are down, and to whom things like these, the barbecues, the invitations, the meeting at the table with friends, seem normal. I hate them all, from first to last, because they don't understand and will never understand, because it's easy for them. Everything has always been easy: work, hang out, live. And I hate my mother who tells me: "Go to a psychiatrist", when she is the one who shaped me like this, when it was forbidden to open the door at the sound of the bell or bring home a friend, and now, instead, from my brother she accepts everything and helps him with his parties. And I hate my brother who says: "You don't have a social life", and fuck, you know what a discovery, it takes Freud to understand it. And I hate him even more when he says to me: "Even when there is only one person plus, you can see that you are there and you don't know what to say. " Well, thank goodness he told me, so now I'll feel more at ease.
Blessed are you, I would like to tell him, blessed are all those who always know what to say. Blessed are the righteous, those who have a direction, a purpose, a role in society. Blessed are those who walk and know where to go.
I only come out when they leave, they look at me a bit dazed, as if to say: "And where has this one been all day, where does she come from?" I greet them as if nothing had happened, as if I had talked to them all day, instead of being holed up upstairs.
The only thought that keeps me afloat in those moments is you, knowing that you exist, that you too, wherever you are, are feeling exactly like me: fish out of water.
Some days I just don't feel like giving advice as a FS guru, I don't feel like laughing about it. It happens that everything implodes inside, collapses like a black hole.

Then it passes, then you breathe, you raise your head, you walk again against the wind.

A fish out of water