Our identities can be our prisons…
without us even realizing.
Most of us — myself included — go through years and even decades before waking up and smacking ourselves:
“Hey – I’m not just that. I’m more than that!”
When that happens, we regret that we limited ourselves to a narrow view of reality, which silently distorted everything else we did and didn’t do in life. We could have been so much more than whatever we defined ourselves by.
I have had social anxiety for the last two decades, and for many years my mental health condition was how I primarily defined myself. It constricted my entire being — much like a boa suffocating its victim — killing my confidence in social situations.
I didn’t feel that I was an interesting person, since all I could associate myself with was my fears when meeting people. The running dialogue in my head was “Why should people get to know me?”
Put in another way, the Ian Chew equation back then was:
Ian = His Social Anxiety
In psychology, this is known as : your entire sense of self is warped around a feeling, or in this case a mental health condition. It’s kind of like the movie Honey I Shrunk The Kids, except that you shrunk all other parts of yourself and magnified one particular part.
It took me lots of practice to unshrink myself — I mean, to expand my identity. To update the Ian Chew equation to the following:
Ian = His Social Anxiety + Marketing Wizardry + Creativity + More Awesomeness That This Article Can’t Fit In
What practice did I take on? I’ve tried many things, but these have been consistently helpful:
- Meditation
- Therapy
- Supportive friends — friends who saw me beyond my social anxiety
- Oh, and talking to hundreds of strangers.
All of these help me get out of my own head — free myself from the grip of social anxiety — and see myself in a more holistic light. In other words, I started viewing social anxiety as a small part of the larger, thriving life I have.
As Tara Brach beautifully wrote:
When we identify with a small self, we are perceiving ourselves as a cluster of ocean waves, not recognizing that we are made of ocean. When we realize our true self is ocean, the familiar pattern of waves—our fears and defensiveness, our wants and busyness—remains a part of us, but it does not define us.
Or as my therapist, Sean Swaby, suggested:
“Notice how anxiety takes you into a small spot, making you less alive. You want to go into a larger spot, so that you can see the larger reality.”
So how can you expand your identity like I did? And really, how can you live a fulfilling life even with social anxiety?
You might not want to talk with that many strangers and that’s OK — I know I’m a bit intense, and I’m lovin’ it *Macdonald’s jingle* Talk with a good friend instead, and ask them what they think about you. They might just see the full you (even when you don’t!)
And when it comes to meditation and therapy, they are life-changing for me, but I also know that either will take commitment to see results. A few suggestions to make things easier for you…
- Meditation: Try app-guided meditation (my mum and younger bro like Headspace.) Also, keep it simple: I recommend a 10-second meditation, where you just sit, close your eyes, and count your breath for 10 seconds.
- Therapy: Here are popular questions people have asked about therapy. If seeing a therapist in person is too intimidating, consider online therapy.
If you want to take action right away, here’s what you can do. Take a moment to write down your identity equation. The following questions might help:
- Who are you? Who are you not?
- Who do you want to become?
- What do you define yourself by?
- What do you stop and start defining yourself by?
- What are the top five words you use to describe yourself?
- How do you introduce yourself to others? Anything you’d change?
Reflecting on your identity is fundamentally important. As a friend of mine, Dean Yeong, said:
“To change your outcome, change your identity and your standard”
And, whatever answer comes to your mind, remember this…
You’re not your social anxiety. You’re more than that.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
