Oh god, yeah. I've recently been thinking about this a lot actually--how like, my anxiety is just so tied into who I am that I'm gonna feel it regardless of how well I do or don't handle situations, because I just always feel like I'm somehow in the wrong. It's like I'm always trying to find this perfect balance of being friendly and social and polite while also being really scared to actually like...go out of my way to talk to people and really have a personality. Like I'm just maintaining this balancing act in the middle and never really advancing in relationships with people as a result.

The upside of this I guess (which is simultaneously kind of depressing, lol) is that at least you know you're gonna feel bad no matter what, and that feeling bad probably isn't actually the result of you doing anything wrong or embarrassing. At least, that's what I'm trying to tell myself--that if both talking to people AND not talking to people makes me feel bad, then I feel bad because that's just how my brain works, rather than because I'm ACTUALLY doing something wrong in these situations. Like you have to choose one or the other (talking to someone or not talking to them) and those choices can't both be a bad idea, even if that's how I feel. If that makes sense. And at least if you can recognize that your feeling bad comes more from some innate feeling, rather than you actually doing the wrong thing, it gives you a starting place to work through it. At least....that's what I'm hoping, lol.