Parenting With Social Anxiety
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"This is fun, but let's not leave the house with this on because people might think we're weird," - My brain
You will notice that this post is a bit different than most for a couple of reasons. First, rather than sharing a story here, I am sharing a link to a story I wrote that was published last week on another site. Second, the story in question isn't all that funny and most of you won't even have access to it anyway because it's behind a paywall (bummer!).
With that being said, here is the link my article in the new membership section of Medium.
So, if any of you happen to be Medium users (and have paid for a membership), I hope you read and enjoy.
For everyone else, I will say just a couple words about the topic, which you might have figured out by now is parenting with social anxiety.
Social anxiety, which is a thing that I have had as long as I can remember, is exciting because, when you are in any type of social situation, you spend all of your time thinking about what other people are thinking about you. Not sure if that's a great description, but it's the best one I can come up with. In practice, what it means is that you avoid interpersonal interaction as much as possible because it's tiring and usually makes you feel bad.
As you can imagine, parenting with such a condition poses some challenges. Both for the parent and, potentially, the child. What I attempted to do with this article for Medium was apply some of the things I've learned through the years to try to help others who might be in the same situation. The goal was to help socially anxious parents help themselves and their children. Yes, it would seem I have made the leap into self-help. Sorry, this is getting depressing.
Anyway, believe it or not, I'm much better now with the social stuff than I used to be (no, seriously). So there is hope! This is likely a topic I will revisit sometime in the future, but I'll leave it at that for now. After all, I don't want to step all over my cash money story!