[Social Anxiety]

Writing was easy for me, once, when all I had to do was write what I love and love what I wrote.

As a child, I was afraid of plenty. The dark, scary ghost, being lost, being left alone in an orphanage because I was too uruly for my parents to handle. But as a child, I hadn’t known of other people’s judgment. I love to write, so I wrote what came to my mind, and that was enough.

But then I grew up, and people are no longer so simple. I learnt to notice how my friends, my family lost interest when I began to talk of what I was passionate about. They still nodded, they still smiled, but their faces were stiff, and the air between us went stale the longer I talked. So I stopped.

It wasn’t their fault, they had their own interests, and I had mine, but the seeds have been planted, and I learnt to fear what other people think.

Then I got a job, and writing what I love was no longer enough. My ideas were shut down, my papers got tossed aside with a single glance, my mind became a mess of recycling and revising as nothing seemed to be good enough.

I forgot what it’s like to write just because I love it. All I could think of was, “I’m just not good enough.”

That was a time in a past long gone. I found those like me since then, those who write what they love because they love what they wrote, but I would forever be left with scar.

So I am here today, fearing the unknown, and that unknown is the judgment of others.