Facing your fears and learning to overcome them is not easy, but possible.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Mental Health
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Yeah. Having to get a job and ending up in a customer facing role did more for getting me over a lot of my shit than anything else I tried. There's still things that are just absolute no-gos for me (singing is the biggest one that comes to mind) but I got over all the shit I had to get over to be able to function more or less normally day to day without too much anxiety.
This is what bothers me about many of the youth around me with anxiety. They lean into it.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it's easy. I'm saying you need to do something proactive or it will never get better.
Everyone has some anxiety, everyone grew up with some anxiety, and yes some people have extreme debilitating anxiety.
Most people should be able to power through, make proactive changes in their lives, and get to a point where they can at least function.
But more and more I see people with mild anxiety leaning into it, regressing and retreating into themselves. Their parents confirming and amplifying the effect. And then they end up worse than they were when they started.
I'm torn because posts like OPs bring attention to those with extreme anxiety, who need allowances and recognition. But it also reaffirms those with mild anxiety, and they identify with it, and they suffer.
Getting a customer facing job was the best thing my buddies kid ever did. Turned her around, 180.
My other buddy got his kid loops for noise reduction in busy environments. He continues to get worse.
Mental illness has become an identity for many people. The internet and social media isn’t helping at all. You can get lots of attention and even social clout by leaning into your mental illness, weaknesses, etc. It’s actually harmful, because it keeps those affected powerless to change by often leaning into how hard they have it. It’s similar to celebration of victimhood. A celebration of self pity and playing the victim.
Acceptance movement of neurodivergent and disabled people often is practiced in a way detrimental to those affected. Well meaning activists and self styled supporters will emphasize loudly and publicly with the poor victims and advocate for special accommodations to be made for them. This then leads to those affected not actually improving their capabilities and health.
Being triggered is celebrated and encouraged. What would actually help is teaching people emotional processing, interroception, coping skills, meditation, social skills.
However activists wouldn’t be able to feel so good about themselves anymore if they enabled affected people to overcome their (perceived) limitations. In practice it’s neurotic enabling, that can make a situation worse.
Let me give you an example. I had a conversation at an event with nudity and a sauna, where a leftist activist was waxing about how an overweight friend of hers. How it‘s impossible for her to go to nice events because of how people always judge fatties and so on. It was all talk on victimhood, pity, oppression, and how woke she is herself. Actually supporting her friend to overcome anxieties, face her fears, deal with discomfort, never crossed her mind. Meanwhile there were several conventionally unattractive and overweight people at the same event having a good time.
The world may suck, not understand you, you might be disadvantaged in many ways. You can eternally feel sorry for yourself, blame others, blame circumstances, and wallow in your suffering. That won’t improve your situation though.
You can change things for better. You can change yourself for the better. You might need help to do it. You won’t need to depend on the leniency, help, and pity of others forever.
Anxiety, ADHD, over eating, addictions, and so on should never be your identity. These are issues, conditions, and challenges to work on.
Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. It’s unhealthy for you.
You are far more capable, powerful, beautiful, and lovely than think you are currently.
Love yourself. That doesn’t mean indulging in all your escapist desires and soothing pleasures. Loving yourself means learning to endure temporary discomfort and embracing the pain of growth and change towards a better life.
This is truly a disgusting viewpoint and you should be ashamed of yourself.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence to support what I wrote.
The Illness Identity model also posits that self-stigma results in other negative consequences related to recovery, including increased risk for suicide (or suicidal ideation), poorer social and vocational functioning, avoidant coping and decreased service engagement.
The most frequently tested, and supported, aspects of the model were relationships between self-stigma and self-esteem, hope, psychiatric symptoms and social relationships. Least frequently studied areas were relationships with suicide, avoidant coping, treatment adherence and vocational functioning, although they were supported in the majority of studies
The very fact that you went immediately to try to back up your statements with "facts" rather than defend the humanity of your claim or try to refute how hateful it is to see the world through the lens that people just cling to their illnessess as a form of identity is extremely toxic.
In so far as people do that, if they do, it is because they are trying to survive a world that wants to destroy them for having an illness, shame on you for blaming them for not being perfect in their experience of being crushed.
The world doesn’t want to destroy them. It’s mostly indifferent.
If you only perceive yourself as a victim, you don’t see the agency you actually have.
The only ones I blame are those who sell mental illness as a lifestyle identity. They aren’t actually helping. This is part of what keeps people stuck.
I don’t blame anyone for not being perfect.
The world doesn’t want to destroy them. It’s mostly indifferent.
Incredible, honestly this a stupendously incredible thing to say with a straight face.
Yes it is clear you have drawn a line clumsily between righteous blame and unfair blame like a President claiming they can know where a hurricane will go by drawing a cartoon on a satellite picture with a sharpie but the problem is not only is the distinction between "good sufferers of mental illness" and "bad sufferers of mental illness" inherently one frought with grey areas it also fails at the axiomatic level that you are assuming you aren't full of shit, biased or necessarily riddled with blind spots in your empathy.
We are all full of shit, biased and riddled with blind spots in our empathy. That is why we strive to develop philosophies and ways of seeing the world that always invite us into more open and accepting versions of ourselves. We need to find ways of probing the incomprehensible parts of the world that actively catch us when we step into the daydream of hate. This is emphatically NOT what your world view does and it is why it is toxic.
In other words even if you worldview here was correct, in order for you to apply it in a truly loving way you would have to be God and have perfect knowledge of everyone around you who is suffering to determine whether they were performing or experiencing suffering a mental illness to thwart the limitations of your perspective and bias.
I regret to inform you but you are not God and therefor this way of looking at the world is toxic.
You believe in judgement before helping and that is what makes you ugly.
You‘re reading all kinds of stuff into my post that isn’t there and throw around vile accusations.
Your angry rants won’t help you. I hope you get better.
Those loops are actually how I deal with being around kids. They keep me from getting stressed by all the screaming and banging around that tends to come with that. It's one of the things I was never able to "power through". Without them I am completely burnt out after like an hour at a family event, less if there's a screaming toddler. If he's just staying in his room and using them to block out everything and avoid people that is an issue though.
Its a matter of perspective, or storytelling if you prefer. If you think you have anxiety because you were born in the introvert camp and that's where you belong, then socializing will always be painful and improvement will be impeded indefinitely. If you think you have anxiety because you are simply inexperienced at socializing and need practice, then you will put yourself in challenging situations and attempt to improve yourself each time.
The stories we tell each other and ourselves are incredibly powerful in guiding our lives.
improvement will be impeded indefinitely
You are missing the OP's point. You can be born introverted and with severe social anxiety and still force yourself out of it. Yes there are those where it is serious enough that they can't . But that is extraordinarily rare.
In high school it was so bad for me that when I had to speak in French class I literally went blank. The teacher took pity on me and let me go to my desk and then read with my head down from my paper rather than in front of the class. No one else in my class of 30 had this problem.
10 years later I got a job where I had to teach TCP/IP across the county. That forced me into public speaking. So I learned to suck it up for 4 hours a day and then went back to my default. Then I started my own company which forced me to be continuously up beat and social. I used Data from TnG as my model where he adopted a command personality when it was needed. But after many years it became my personality.
I'm the one who calls friends now. I'm the one that hosts parties.
It sounds like you had a perspective that allowed growth and learning, as opposed to the one in my quote.
Im talking more about the harm labels like introvert can have. It feels nice in the short term to have an explanation and a group to belong to (ironically), but its ultimately harmful as it does not match reality.
Trial by fire basically.
Shut in introvert who struggled with basic conversation with strangers morphed into somehow who can feign extroversion the well enough after long enough in IT.
I still hate parties and most larger social gatherings, but I can at least manage without wanting to curl into a ball. For the most part.
vrchat did it for me, people calling me slurs and them not be able to do anything about me just vibing made me realize, it really is just watching a child rage because of a toy
i have heard "Why did you do x? And you cant use your autism as an excuse" said
i dont understand these peoples thinking
here's the thing: they have no thinking.
Paranoia?
In this economy climate, this is just Tuesday.