Interesting?

The other day I was reading a request for bloggers with interesting blogs to get in touch, it finished with the following statement "be honest, you know if you're interesting or not."

The problem is, I don't.  I find my writing interesting, but I am well aware that different people have different tastes.  An example of this is my undying love of blue brie, a taste I am well aware is not shared by a great many people.

I believe I have mentioned before that I have social phobia.  This manifests in many ways, often intermingling with my anxiety disorder, but the most common is that something as simple as "you know if you're interesting or not" makes me overanalyse everything I know about myself and how people view me.

The thought process goes something along the lines of:
Do other people know if they're interesting?
They must or they wouldn't say that.
So other people know what is interesting and what isn't?
Am I somehow defective for not instinctively knowing this?
Maybe I just shouldn't say anything.
I have absolutely nothing to contribute to this situation.
I have absolutely nothing to contribute to any situation.
And eventually:

I try to avoid feeling like that through mental and behavioural control techniques, and I try to avoid talking about it because acknowledging that I have this thing hanging over my head which could cause me to break down in tears and thoughts tending towards the macabre at any given moment.

I like to think that on the whole I tend to present myself as fairly happy and upbeat and as people are often surprised when I tell them I have social phobia I assume I do that reasonably well.  However, I am never sure how much faith to put in other people's responses because they may just be humouring me.

So I don't know if anyone other than me thinks I'm interesting, I don't know if anyone else wants to read what I put here.  But I'm going to keep doing it because I enjoy it and I'm hoping that others will as well.

Sick in the Head

So I have depression, generalised anxiety disorder and social phobia.  This probably sounds like a very down way of starting a post but bear with me.

Usually I manage to control all of this pretty well, but there is one thing that is guaranteed to set me off and that is packing for a trip - particularly one I'm going on by myself.  Which I have never done before now to the extent of spending an entire month on another continent away from anyone I've known for more than 10 months.

Why, you may wonder, does this tend to manifest when I'm packing rather than in the social situation itself?  Because I know that I will be trapped in situations that are likely to make me uncomfortable and I'm going to be without my support network of family and friends, and often unable to excuse myself from said situations (hence the use of the word 'trapped' I suppose).

Given this propensity for stressing out one could be easily forgiven for assuming I'd be curled up in a corner bawling my eyes out, but I'm feeling surprisingly calm about the whole thing.  Not that calm is a word I expected to use about myself right now, excited, hyped, nervous, these would all be more appropriate descriptions but I was expecting more of the sheer terror side of things than I am actually feeling.

I see two possibilities with this, the first is that I'm actually learning to deal better with my depressive, anxious and social phobic issues.  Lol, yeah right.  The second possibility is that this is such a colossal amount of worry and anxiety for me to feel that I can't comprehend it and, paradoxically this makes me even less worried because whatever happens I'll have had an entirely new experience and I am sure that it will have a positive impact on how I deal with my issues more generally.

So a happy new year to all, and here's to my first challenge and adventure of 2013, America.