People Are People So Why Should it Be...

In The Anxiety Book, it says that for most people, the anticipation of a stressful situation is worse than the event itself, but for social anxiety sufferers the situation is as bad or even worse than they imagined. I tried to explain that to my counselor. I don't know if she got it. It really is horrible to live out the physical symptoms in front of an audience. Just being the focus of attention is torture in itself.

I liked seeing validation of this in print; SAD is different from shyness and it's different from other anxiety disorders.

I was in a support group through the university's couseling center. I liked talking to people who go through the same things as I do, and I found it easier to practice speeches on them before going in front of the class. I didn't see it helping me make real changes, however, and I wished there was an advanced group for people really driven to defeat their social phobia. I ended up leaving the group because I couldn't afford the time and because I just didn't think it was enough for me. I'm trying to work on this in other ways for now and maybe I'll join up again when I have more time for it.

The Second Quietest in the Class!

Yes! I am no longer the quietest student on the class . . . in one of my classes. There was a discussion yesterday in creative writing about who was the quietest and my teacher named Abby. I was pretty happy that I wasn't mentioned. Then she said, "Well, Sarah's pretty quiet, too." Dammit. Well, I just need to try harder.

I posted my short story on our class' discussion board. Now I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what they thought. To tell you the truth, I'm not scared; I'm excited. I know my story isn't the worst. It's actually kind of funny. The writing isn't bad. I know they'll find a lot for me to fix, but I'm just happy to have my first ever short story done and being read by other people!

The internship landed me my first published writing. Not attributed to me (of course). I wrote the press release for the library's screening of New Moon. It'll be run in the newspaper and I'll definitely be keeping a copy of that for my portfolio. It makes me happy.