How Social Anxiety Made Me a Better Person

My own suffering made me realize how I made someone else feel

In 1969, a kid has red eyes as a result of a genetic condition called ocular albinism, and he’s called a “devil child” by almost everyone in his more conservative Catholic school. Some of his teachers actually believe he’s a devil child. He’s bullied mercilessly.

He doesn’t have any friends until he meets the only Black student in the school, who’s also a misfit for the reasons you can speculate in 1969. He also fits in with a girl who rebels against the strict dress codes and confines of the Catholic school and upends gender norms.

The three of them gravitate toward each other as the school outcasts and misfits.

This is the premise of The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni. I just finished the book and just thought about how there’s a part of the protagonist in all of us. Not all of us have red eyes, but all of us have something that makes us different from other people in our in-groups.

For me, I can also say that’s my race as an Asian-American when I hang out with non-Asian peers. But saying that feels cheap and disingenuous. Sometimes, I felt a greater affinity with non-Asians than I did with Asians, because there was something different about me in Asian circles, as well.

I’m not saying I wasn’t as good at math or as into Pokemon, because I was. But my interests in writing, history, and the humanities, among other things that caused me to think really deeply and not necessarily engage with what other people were interested in always made me feel a bit different. If I were to pinpoint one thing, I can’t. It’s a lot of things.

The protagonist of the book spends his whole life learning to embrace rather than reject his unique difference as a person with red eyes. At 18, he starts wearing contact lenses to hide his eyes and make them appear brown, and only takes them off when he has a somewhat revolutionary experience.

I will say that it’s funny that people know me as extroverted now, and I guess I am. But I used to be very quiet and I will say that in high school, I did suffer from an enormous amount of social anxiety. I overanalyzed social situations and thought people judged me a lot for breathing too loudly or noises from my stomach when it would growl. Of course, the more I fixated on these things, the worse they got. The more I tried to quell my breathing in a quiet classroom, the more I would hyperventilate.

It sounds trivial and, to some, irrational (which I guess it was), but it was very real at the time. I also don’t think it necessarily ever went away. There are still times when my stomach will growl in a quiet setting, and I just have to think “yeah, no one really cares” or “people have better things to worry about.” I do realize what I knew at the time but had so many doubts about: a lot of it is in my head.

But I am grateful that that anxiety about these minor things that I felt made me a freak or outcast made me a better person. Prior to obsessing over how loud I was breathing or whether my stomach growled too often, I wasn’t necessarily the best person. No one is at 12 years old, I guess, but I always felt like I was “in” or “cool,” and made fun of people who I deemed weren’t.

I can tell you how judgemental I was, but it’s easier to demonstrate with an example: when I was 11, my friends and I made a YouTube video on Windows Movie Maker about how much we didn’t like a kid in our neighborhood. I felt completely justified at the time and like I had done nothing wrong, but it was cyberbullying before there was necessarily even a word for it that hit the mainstream (2008–2009). It escalated to the point where his parents showed the video to our middle school administration, and my friends and I were called into the assistant principal’s office and forced to take it down. My teacher expressed how disappointed she was in me because she couldn’t fathom her best student in math class being a bully outside the classroom.

So, how I felt about everyone judging me and thinking I was a freak for hyperventilating in quiet classrooms or having my stomach growl like crazy was, in hindsight, how my friends and I made this kid feel when we made that video. And, of course, we didn’t make that video in a vacuum — there were constant back and forth where I simply was not the most accepting person. I later moved away, but I sincerely regretted being so immature and making that video, among other things.

No one wants to think of themselves as the bully, and there was never really a time I was able to apologize because after moving away, I never saw the kid again. He had blocked me and a couple of other people on Facebook. I later learned he came out as gay several years later, and going through what I was going through and realizing that I had been such a shitty person and friend, I gradually realized I had to change and become more accepting.

I don’t think anyone is necessarily the paragon of acceptance and tolerance at 11 years old, but my social anxiety had changed me from the boisterous, hyperactive, and kind of annoying kid to the super shy and quiet one who never said a word — at least that’s how I felt. That started to be my reputation, too — nice person, just really shy and quiet, except I wanted to show more of who I was, but it felt like there was a force just stopping me.

Regardless, over the next several years, I would grow an affinity towards those who were also really quiet and different in whatever capacity. As a cross country runner, the runners in the school accepted me and made me feel accepted and welcome. And I wanted to make others also feel accepted and not judged.

I started to gravitate towards the really shy and quiet kids, the ones I noticed people didn’t really talk to that much and really try to make them feel welcomed and open up. This has translated into later in life, too, but I would start including them in group projects, randomly including them in group chats, cracking jokes and sitting with them in class because I wondered if they felt the same pain I felt when I isolated myself. They seemed different on the outside, but I realized that’s because no one necessarily gave them the chance and reached out enough to make them feel included.

I always realized that a lot of people who seem shy and quiet don’t actually want to be shy. Don’t get me wrong — there are some genuinely quiet and mellow people who say much. But a lot of shy people might not know what to say or feel like they’ll be judged or left out if people don’t like them. But every human being has that yearning for being accepted and welcomed, and shy people, a lot of the time, just take a lot more to warm up to people, but are usually very grateful to the people who made the effort to include them, too. I know I certainly was.

I wasn’t trying to play savior, but I did always want everyone to be included and accepted in social settings.

It stems from the thing that made me different — my own social anxiety, my own yearning to be accepted, which has verged into people-pleasing at times.

As a teacher, I also noticed that really quiet and shy kids often got forgotten about and de-prioritized compared to the kids who exhibited the most behavioral challenges or spoke up most in class. Sometimes, other teachers wouldn’t even know the names of the super quiet and shy kids and would accidentally mark them absent. I once called the parents of one kid to give positive feedback about how well-behaved and diligent the student was. The parent said that that’s what every teacher said about their son, but it stopped being a compliment after a while. It meant their kid didn’t speak up and didn’t advocate for himself when he needed help, and she wanted him to learn how to do that because that would be a skill needed for him to survive in the real world.

We all have that thing that makes us different, like the protagonist who has red eyes. And the cliche thing to say is that that difference is what makes us beautiful, what makes us unique. However, it takes a very long time to come to that realization and you can know it, but not emotionally accept it in your heart.

I ultimately realized this overanalysis of social situations, the social anxiety that manifested itself in me being really shy and quiet when I was younger, was, at the end of the day, a gift. It felt horrible at the time, but it made me a much more inclusive and accepting person who gravitated towards others who had once felt the same way as me, people who had felt like outcasts in whatever capacity. It manifested politically, as well, as I got a lot more liberal and progressive in my outward views of the world, but that’s a story for another time.

And so I am grateful for that past, and on most days, I don’t even think about it much anymore. But once in a while, I do. My social anxiety was the one force that transformed me from a bully who made videos on YouTube about how much I didn’t like someone to a person who tried to make everyone in the room feel welcomed and included.

Therapy wasn’t as accepted then as it is now. Plus, with a very traditional Asian family that didn’t even know what mental illness was, it would have been very difficult to explain. I wish I could have made it not as painful as it was, at points. Everyone can benefit from a therapist, whether they have anxiety, depression, another mental illness, or no diagnosed mental illness at all, and today, anyone who went through what I went through would be better off seeing a medical professional or therapist than not.

Ultimately, my path did require my own suffering to realize how I made someone else feel. That’s how, for me, it was supposed to be. And that’s why I am a lot more accepting and welcoming today.