Can’t please em’ all
I’m afraid of many things: mostly birds, but also large bodies of water, enclosed spaces, bugs and scammers. I’d like to say that these are all reasonable fears, but honestly, they all aren’t. The difference between a fear and a phobia lies in its rationality. My fear of birds, ornithophobia, is a phobia by definition because my being near them induces severe episodes of panic, sweating and a ridiculous amount of distress. Those other ones, however, are simply fears since they are only a response to immediate danger– to be clear, I don’t answer a scam call and pass out. I have two other phobias, though, that invoke the same feeling as a pigeon walking toward me on the streets of New York. They are not formally recognized or named, but they completely alter how I go about living my life: being vulnerable, and worse, rejected.
I know that nobody is going out trying to be rejected for fun, it sucks, everyone knows that– except I really don’t like it. This is why I took this typically minor punch to the ego a step further and created a mental bond in my brain that tells me being vulnerable intrinsically leads to rejection, unlocking a whole new fear.
I wish I could pinpoint exactly when it happened, but I can’t. I gradually adopted this mentality that if I stopped caring, stopped trying, then I wouldn’t be upset by hearing the word “no.” So, that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t run for club president in fear of losing, I didn’t give my all during sports so I wouldn’t be embarrassed after a mistake and I stopped applying myself at school so that a bad grade wasn’t personal. Though, in comparison to the grand scope of my whole life, these things are miniscule at best. The way that this phobia has manifested the most harm in my life is through personal relationships.
The irrationality of my fear is deep-rooted and has slowly evolved and festered until it consumed me. I’m not saying that this is my villain origin story, that would be dramatic even for me. What I am saying is that it doesn’t feel nice finding out that a boy asked you on a date as a dare or that your life-long best friend replaced you with someone new. This happened to me all too often, which made my analytical brain deduce that it was some sort of predictable model– caring too much about people drives them away, a causal relationship.
My goal then was no longer to avoid rejection but to rid it from my life altogether. I stopped letting people get close to me. I used sarcasm and humor as a defense mechanism. I assumed the role of the “funny friend”, cracking one-liners to distract others from actually getting to know me. Nobody took me too seriously, but that’s how I liked it; after all, you can’t reject a person you don’t fully know, right? I projected the image that I didn’t care much about anything at all, but in reality, I lived with the crippling fear that the people in my life were going to reject me like a bad organ.
I took this so far, in fact, that for years, I took pride in knowing that I could count the number of people I’d hugged on two hands. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell anyone I loved them, besides my dog on the rarest of occasions. It’s like I brainwashed myself– I was so overtaken in the belief that if no one knew me, like really knew me, then it wasn’t me they were rejecting, but some alter-ego I had created for them. I put apathy on a pedestal because it worked for me, well right up until it didn’t.
What I did not project in my analysis of vulnerability, rejection and apathy, was how isolated it could make you feel. I didn’t predict that I could be surrounded by people and still feel an overwhelming sense of loneliness. I wasn’t able to break the bond I had so carefully constructed in my mind, so instead I resorted to thinking that being lonely was an inherent part of life– something I would never be able to escape. I know that sounds like a sad way to live but I got by. This became my new normal. I had friends but always kept them at an arm’s distance, no exceptions. This was my life from ages 13-18, when, in a completely cliche turn of events, college changed this fundamental part of my mentality.
The college experience is so unique in the fact that you can’t exactly hide who you are for very long. I never had the luxury of leaving a function early to rot in my bed, especially since the functions tended to be in my room where I was already rotting in said bed. I found people that I didn’t have to put a show on for. People who challenged me to let them into my life, and it worked. All of a sudden I was allowed to be quiet some days and obnoxious on others without feeling like I was killing the mood. I was allowed to be vulnerable without feeling invalidated. I, for whatever reason, felt like I was now allowed to let people in if I saw fit.
That brings us to the present day. I am not saying that my fear of rejection is gone by any means (genuinely, ask any of my friends if they think I’m over it and they’ll laugh right in your face). There is still work to be done. I still have a hard time advocating for myself because I’m scared of getting left on heard or asking for help in fear of looking incompetent and, quite frankly, I do fear that the people in my life might one day leave me. But that is just a risk I figured I was going to have to take at this point because before that decision, I was in a losing battle with vulnerability and it was exhausting. So this is me waving the white flag, putting down my weapons and surrendering (or at least trying) to vulnerability.