One day, while my wife and I were sitting on the couch watching our evening shows and our boys were quietly sleeping; she turned to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of FOMO?” She was working on a lesson for the bible study she was leading, and she was specifically addressing the new phenomena created by social media. As she explained what she meant, I was overwhelmed with emotions. My past struggles and anxieties now had a name. “FOMO.”

The definition of FOMO is as follows, “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.” Most people associate the fear of missing out with the new culture of social media, but before technology created this problem, there was homeschooling.

I can remember my Mom telling me, “I’m not keeping anything from you.” But no matter her admonitions I would continue to believe that I was missing out.

This behavior led me to change aspects of myself and my social interactions after graduating high school. I can remember purposefully doing things to shed the “goodie two shoes” “sheltered Christian homeschooler” labels that I was branded with by others my freshmen year of college. My reputation would take a hit, but the result was that my peers included me in their world of adventures and mischief. It wasn’t social media that caused this in me, I don’t get any anxiety from social media. Anytime anyone in my life would not include me (whether it was a social event, a secret struggle, a turn of phrase I didn’t know, a movie I hadn’t watched, a band I hadn’t heard, a book I hadn’t read… etc.) I would immediately feel shame and pretend to know the reference and then quickly take to the internet or the video store to rectify my glaring non-conformity.

Looking back, I laugh at how silly a lot of this seems. But, even today, I have to fight the impulse to feel shame at own my ignorance of something so minuscule as a quote or a pop culture reference.

When I get to the root of my anxiety, it stems from always being on the outside looking in. I was not an unpopular child. However, because I was homeschooled, I was both the most popular kid in the homeschool group and an outcast from the general public (composed mostly of public school kids and even most private school kids). I was not included in the “in” crowd; I couldn’t be. Even the kids who liked me couldn’t add me to the group because I just wasn’t there for all of the inside jokes or shared experiences.

While some of this is just my personality, I am confident that my experiences of being bullied and excommunicated from the group at an early age, shaped a lot of who I am today. Even now I am naturally drawn to the outcasts or the people at the edge of society who are outside. These are the people I want to include and get to know.

Another result of my anxiety is that nearly all of my lifelong friendships are not from grade school (like so many of my wife’s). Most of my closest and most profound friendships were made in college and afterward. In these relationships, I was there for all of the events, the inside jokes, and the shared experiences. Even my wife is someone who admittedly would not have known or likely hung out with me in high school. Not because she was some “mean girl,” but by her admission, she just didn’t know any homeschool kids. The entire concept was foreign to her.

Today as a 32-year-old man with a wife and two children and a mortgage, I am comfortable in my own experience. While I still have to struggle with the fear of missing out, I have developed coping mechanisms and ways of dealing with my social anxiety. I will even come home after a hard day at the office and feel crippled by the fear that something is happening at work or in my relationships for which I am being left out. But on those days, I cling to the relationships with my wife and my sons and hold them tight knowing that I am just in my head again.

The fear of missing out is just one example of how homeschooling shaped who I am today. I am not saying that homeschooling is terrible or that even I regret my parents homeschooling my sisters and I. There are so many reasons I would not change my upbringing, and I am eternally grateful to my parents for the ways they helped me along.

An example of that is my struggle with ADHD and other learning disabilities that were undiagnosed when I was at home. Being homeschooled taught me coping mechanisms that allowed me to be an excellent student and essentially learn my way. I look back and realize how ridiculous some of my fears and anxieties were and how truly blessed I was to have parent’s who cared enough to invest in my siblings and me.

No matter the good and the bad homeschooling is nonetheless one of the things that shaped me. My fears and anxieties helped me become the person that I am. The key is not allowing that fear to control or oppress you and choosing to move forward.