In my last entry, I said that an explanation of my therapy would have to wait for another time. Well, it's another time now.

So the reason I'm in therapy is that I have Social Anxiety Disorder. For those of you who aren't familiar, it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. I can't really describe it very well, except that it basically feels like everyone is constantly watching and judging you, and that no matter how much you try to tell yourself you don't care what they think, you know that you really do. That explanation doesn't really do it justice, but it's the best I can come up with. As you can imagine, this makes social interaction extremely difficult. In fact, it was such a severe handicap that I would sometimes cut class in high school and spend the whole period hiding in the bathroom to avoid particularly anxiety provoking situations. Needless to say, I'm not exactly proud of that.

My grades have always suffered because of it as well, and at one point it looked like I might not be able to graduate, despite my exceptionally high test scores and all my teachers saying how smart I was. It's because of these academic struggles that I started seeing a therapist. I do something called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which (in practice, at least) basically just means going out and forcing myself to interact with people so that I build up experience and get more used to it. I'd like to think I've been making progress, but sometimes it's hard to tell. It's often a day to day or even case by case thing.

I'm not really sure what else there is to say about it, but I just thought I should establish that, since it's a pretty big part of my life.