Depression and Social Anxiety Shouldn't Get Along as Well as They Do

It don't make much sense... Feelings of depression make us feel like we're totally and completely worthless, like nothing we do is ever right or ever matters, like drivers only stop when we cross the street because they don't wanna mess up their car with the weight of our guts. But feelings of social anxiety are almost the exact opposite of that, they make us feel as if we're at the very center of the universe, they make us feel like everyone everywhere is staring right at us, paying great attention to every single thing we do, perpetually hoping we mess up and make a fool of ourselves... So which one is it? Are we trash that nobody cares about or are we so important that people can't even look away? And if these two feelings are in such stark opposition to one another, why is it that they go together like peanut butter and jelly? Why is it that people who feel completely worthless and invisible also feel they are constantly being watched? I have no bleeding clue nor do I promise to give you an answer by the end of this little post. I am, as often, thinking out loud.

Another Yu-Gi-Oh! card, because why not

The first answer that comes to mind when wondering about that social anxiety fear of constantly being watched is that some people actually are constantly being watched. It could well be that in certain situations of bullying, every time a person speaks he or she really is being watched by people who are just salivating at the prospect of an awkward and embarrassing moment. That might be true for some people, and it's an entirely regrettable situation, but if I leave it at that, I'll have to end this post right here. So to continue on a bit further, what about when those situations of bullying don't really happen? What about when the depressive person has pretty much no reason, at least no immediate or obvious reason, to assume people around him are malicious? What about when the depressive person just has this strange inclination to assume that, when a stranger around him laughs, it's because the depressive person unknowingly did something stupid that is now being mocked? What about when that laughter isn't malicious or even directed at anyone?

In those cases the situation has to be different. For whatever reason, the worthlessness of depression breeds the strange and absolute centrality of social anxiety. It doesn't add up that people don't give a damn about you while at the same time they only care about you because you're the center of the entire universe, though that care is inevitably tied with wholly unpleasant things. So how do we make sense of this? We probably don't, and it would appear that depression and social anxiety also have an odd mix of an emotional chaos and a cold rationality. It makes perfect sense to feel somewhat limited, to acknowledge some of your shortcomings as a mere fact, to accept that you aren't all that interesting to the vast majority of people in this world because, well, everyone is limited, everyone has factual shortcomings and everyone is uninteresting to the vast majority of people in this world. But over time that downward spiral starts to fester some unpleasant thoughts that become more and more irrational... Why do we get so embarrassed over our own little awkward things when we don't feel the same way when others do those exact same things? Why do we get so self-conscious over misreading a word in class when we don't necessarily punish others for doing the same? Well, maybe we do, maybe we judge them negatively, and so we reasonably expect others to judge us by the same measure. Depression makes us vain and miserable and hateful, though we may occasionally try to fight it and to have kinder thoughts about the people around us. But when we are so overwhelmed by bad thoughts towards everyone else, we then tend to assume everyone has bad thoughts towards us.

If this subject can be understood rationally, then maybe an answer is something like that... Depression creates bad thoughts, and rationality makes us realize that the bad thoughts we have towards others can just as easily be applied onto ourselves, that is to say, other people can and likely do think similarly about us. And social anxiety, which makes no sense when allied to depression, actually becomes depression's best buddy because you end up chasing some kind of perfection, inevitably coming up short because that's what perfection is, a constant chase. That in turn gives you the social anxiety that nothing you do is ever good enough and that people are just constantly and consistently waiting for you to fail.

Then again, in many ways none of this is the least bit rational... For all intents and purposes we don't care when other people mess up, or when they say good morning and nobody hears them, or when they miss a handshake, or when they stutter on a word, or when they trip on the street... But when we do those things they annoy us to no end, we get the distinct feeling that everyone saw it and stared at us and thought we were a complete idiot. Realistically though, we know they didn't, we know people don't really notice, hell, these days they're all on their phones anyway, and if they do look up from them they won't remember us five minutes later. We know they didn't care because in general people don't care, that's the number one thing depression teaches. But then why does social anxiety teach the opposite? Why does it teach that everyone does care, that everyone watches our boring lives so attentively, that everyone takes every single one of our little shortcomings as exhibits of our inferiority? Depression and social anxiety shouldn't be coherent, they shouldn't happen to the same person at the same time, and yet they do. So to phrase the question somewhat differently would be – why do people who feel so worthless also seem to crave an unrealistic standard of perfection?

I don't really know, I'm just improvising here... It's just been sticking in my craw lately. Depression and social anxiety are two things that somehow make no sense when together, while at the same time they go together so well that to say the first almost melodiously presupposes the second. In other words, people who suffer from one tend to logically suffer from the other. But why though? If we are as worthless as street trash, then we shouldn't feel socially anxious because people simply don't care about us. Weirdly enough, we feel like street trash when people don't notice us, but then whenever they do happen to notice us, we assume their attention is wholly malevolent and we feel like the court jester, the sad clown... Depression and its buddies force us to play games we simply can't win because either nobody gives a damn about us, which is sad, or everyone cares about us to the point of judging us on every single detail, which is sad... Now I don't know what else to say except perhaps this – depression has a funny way of making things seem completely rational and completely irrational at the same time.

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Paulo Seabra

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