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When did my worrying of how others perceive me start? In high school? Maybe even before that? I’m not exactly sure when this anxiousness started. I’m trying to remember if this trait of mine developed early on in life, or if it happened later in my adolescence. Either way, it’s here. It’s here today. My social anxiety used to be big. Today, shadows of that beast remain. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always held myself to the highest standard. I never wanted to display weakness or make any sort of mistake in front of anyone.
Now that I look back on those years, I believe it was hypocritical of me to want to be perfect. I tried to never make any mistakes in front of the eyes of people or ask for anyone’s help as much as possible. There was this self-made pressure, of course, to maintain a zen, calm, I-can-do-it-all energy about me; though I didn’t see it at the time, it was this very attitude that attracted the jealousy (or is it envy?) and resentment of those who were once close to me. I definitely think that I, in some way, threatened a couple of people’s self-concept and for that reason, they attacked me. But I don’t know. Maybe I’m still too self-absorbed to see the truth. May Allah always guide me and everyone who believes in Him to the truth. Which reminds me! there’s this ayah that says something along the lines of “We’ll show them our signs out there in the horizon and also within themselves until they’ve established that this is the truth….” Alhamdulilah. May Allah guide me to that haqq. Ameen.
I think my not wanting to receive help from anyone stems from the fact that I didn’t receive the help and attention I desired from my parents when I was younger. I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I did everything on my own. I, too, was once a couple of pounds, incapable of helping myself or anyone else. Of course they fed me and clothed me and gave me shelter, and for that I am thankful to them and to the Most Merciful, alhamdulilah, but that was just it. They (my parents) did the bare minimum and nothing more.
I don’t know if this reality rings true for all of my siblings. I think we’re so different from one another, and because of that, maybe we each received a different version of our parents. This is the version of my parents that I got: food, bed, clothes, and teaching me about islam were checked boxes. Maybe in their parenting agenda, they only had the bare minimum on their list. I feel like they were surviving life instead of actually living life. I like to think that, as a child, a very perceptive part of me caught on to the fact that we existed on survival mode. Because I saw my mother running on fumes almost all the time, I had to start pulling my own weight to burden her less. I used to ask her so many questions. She couldn’t answer them. So, eventually I stopped asking her and withdrew into myself.
For a good chunk of my childhood, it was just my mother, my siblings and I living together. Our father was out of the picture. That makes it sound like they were divorced. They weren’t divorced. Anywho, my mom had to be the mother and the father of the house all the time. That must’ve been so exhausting for her. For that, I pray that Allah swt has mercy on her and grants her the loftiest of positions in Jannahtul firdaws. Ameen. I don’t fully know if my parents did their best with the tools that were available to them, but I’m grateful for them. In life and in death, may Allah have mercy on our parents. Ameen.
Hm… so I think it’s safe to say that rejecting help from others is something I started doing early on… as a kid. I just don’t get how that translated into being such a try-hard and ultimately, developing the illness people these days call ‘social anxiety.’ I don’t know when it started, but I found myself wanting to avoid huge crowds when I used be okay in big crowds. I always loathed group discussions in school. In university, whenever I could, I’d avoid classes where a huge chunk of my grade would depend on presentations or talking in general. For a while, I was even horrified of looking at people’s faces. I think my manifestation of this type of fear is both fake and unwarranted for one simple reason: I didn’t fear Allah nearly as much as I feared people.
I’ve always been an introverted person, but this fake fear of mine really took my introvertedness to the next level. At any rate, if I didn’t fear the One who created everything as He deserved to be feared, then what huge thing could’ve possibly made me fear His creations more than fearing Him? To this, I have no sensible answer other than that it was an unjustified fear. May He forgive me. Ameen. This is what I’m calling social anxiety from now on: a fake fear of people. Broadly speaking, this malady is a fear based on one’s perceivable and imagined lack, and how people may react to said lack.
Since we can’t directly see Allah, I anticipated receiving retribution for my glaring inefficiencies from the sources I could perceive, which was creation. More specifically: humans. Astagfirullah. I pray I never return to this state of being. Ameen. May Allah protect us all from an unjustified fear of His creation, and may we love and fear Him more than anything in the worlds. Ameen. I think my wording is a bit weird here; it allows for an uncomfortable question to be asked: can a person have justified fear of Allah’s creation? I think the obvious answer is no, but I don’t like saying no and not having a comprehensive reasoning backing my answer. I think one obvious reason is because it’s shirk (meaning: associating a partner with Allah) to fear someone as much or even more than you fear Allah. I’ll have to turn to the Qur’an and classical Tafsir to deeply comprehend why the answer is no. I do also understand that sometimes the answer is just a simple no. I’m just usually not one to stick with simple answers, and I need to work on this side of mine that always yearns to dig deeper.
To shift a little, I wouldn’t say I felt like I had to compete for my parent’s attention, so that’s definitely not a reason why I wanted to be good at everything. I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to excel in everything because I met people who had nothing. One of the pros of growing up in different places is that you meet people that inhabit different places in the social hierarchy. By the way, I don’t know if believe in the methodology of our society’s established hierarchy; I think its arbitrary and silly, but my thoughts aren’t fully formed on it so I’ll talk about it another day, insha’Allah.
Anyways, we met a lot of people on our travels. Many were less fortunate, some were rich, others were the average middle-class type. I don’t think this is a good enough answer. It hasn’t provided a satisfying and truthful understanding as to why I’m apparently a “perfectionist,” hasn’t convinced me yet. I’ll try to tackle this problem again some other time, insha’Allah.