About five and a half years ago, when I was still with my ex-boyfriend and he moved in with his sister and her husband for a few months to save rent, my social anxiety used to be a lot worse and interacting with people was frustrating. I would visit said boyfriend and was at the mercy of social interaction too frequently for my comfort. On top of this, the sister’s husband (we’ll call him Greg) was a really intimidating guy. A real life ex-pimp, he stood a foot above me and was the kind of person that had judgement to dole out for everyone around him. Basically, a lot of dry kindling for someone with social anxiety.

While most people react with surprise at discovering I have SA, Greg could see it plain as day. I’m sure it didn’t help that he made me even more uncomfortable than most people, but I always felt like he was evaluating me, judging me. It bugged the shit out of me. The problem is, even though he could tell I was always uncomfortable, he didn’t actually know the first thing about SA. So he did what most people do: he told me to stop being uncomfortable.

Right — cause that actually fucking works, thanks.

“You know you don’t need to be uncomfortable here, Tien. You need to relax. I don’t bite. You need to talk more, and speak up. Just stop being so worried all the time.”

He said these kinds of things to me literally every time I saw him. And you know what happened? Every time I saw him I became increasingly more and more anxious, because I knew he would point out that I was anxious, which would make me feel absolutely AWFUL every single time, without fail. I did everything I possibly could to avoid him so that I wouldn’t have to listen to him tell me to just turn off my emotions.

Now, he was one of the worst, but the truth is that a pretty big number of “normal” people have a tendency to offer similar advice. The problem is, if you don’t have SA, you could never possibly understand what it feels like. You, as a normal person, might be able to willpower your way through your feelings and just turn them off and on at your leisure, but those of us with social anxiety will never have that luxury. We are drowning in shit, inhaling it, choking on it, but we still have to try to keep breathing and interacting anyway. It takes a lot more effort for us to just do everyday things than it does you. It’s hard to imagine how much more effort it takes to maneuver a semi through a crowded city when you’ve been driving a motorcycle your whole life.

Maybe if I put it a different way, it will help you understand. It’s called social anxiety disorder because it’s a form of mental illness. You can’t think of SA as just “poor mindset” or “weakness” because it’s not. AT ALL. In fact, people with social anxiety are stronger than most — we have to be, to survive. If you watched someone fall down a flight of stairs and break their leg, would you say to them, “just get up and keep going; ignore the pain and you’ll be fine tomorrow” ? No. No you wouldn’t, because it’s obvious what stupid and utterly useless advice that is. But because SA is invisible and you don’t understand what the experience of having it is ACTUALLY like (all you have are mild fears and self-doubts that you’ve prided yourself on being able to push through) it is so easy for you to brush it off like it’s some imagined aspect that the person has exacerbated because they can’t see things as clearly as you do.

News flash: you’re wrong.

Just because you don’t understand what someone is going through doesn’t mean you can’t have compassion for the fact that the experience is real and painful for them.

“But so many people have it so much worse off than you do. You have nothing to feel bad about. Just suck it up.”

Of course there are people that have it worse off than I do. Of course. But do you walk into a Cancer support group and say things like, “but there are people who have AIDS, and they have it so much worse than you do” ? Do you tell someone who has lost both of his legs that he needs to just get over it because there are other people that lost all of their limbs? No you don’t. Because it’s insensitive, and because you would sound like a total asshole.

Well, guess what? I know you’re not trying to, but when you say things like that to those of us with social anxiety, you also sound like a total asshole. I know you probably don’t mean to, so that’s why I’m telling you. If you notice that someone is uncomfortable, don’t push and poke them about it constantly. Let them move through it awkwardly and at their own pace.

Yes, from the outside looking in, it can seem like our experience is trivial, or we are making it up, or it’s all in our heads. It’s easy to brush off that which you can’t see. But the experience of living with SA for your entire life is overwhelmingly painful and impossible to understand unless you have it. It’s kind of like being locked in a dark room with a bunch of cruel people who are all eager to constantly tell you what an awful person you are and how you fail at everything and you don’t deserve to be liked or loved and they don’t need sleep or breaks or food, they just keep shouting, talking, whispering in your ear. And at the same time you’re supposed to interact with the world through this tiny little hole the size of a watermelon, but the dark room and the voices are bigger and louder and they are all around you and they never. shut. up. If you had to live like that, you would struggle at interacting with the world, too.