On Anxiety Disorders

I visited a girlfriend in Atlanta some years ago. Two of her roommates were young single men, actors in the local theater scene. Very interesting people - some of the most uninhibited and extroverted I've ever met. They’d come home and walk in the door singing songs loudly like no one was home and continue to sing for some time. They were basically thinking out loud. Whatever inhibitory barrier that keeps most of us from being spontaneous as opposed to controlled was simply absent, like it had been removed by some weird operation. I've never seen anyone do that before. We were having a conversation once and one of them said in a solemn but wise tone

Fear is the enemy.

As if he was summing up a lot of life itself right there. And I’m afraid he was. If you’re an actor, no doubt it is an enemy, but it’s one you’ve defeated in battle.

As someone with an anxiety disorder, I sadly concur, albeit in my case an enemy that’s got me beat a lot (but not all) of the time. Almost no one seems to get that our whole problem is driven by fear. Most of these disorders are 100% fear and 0% anything else. People don’t get us at all. They just think we’re weirdos or dangerous or better yet, dangerous weirdos. I get that a lot. But I grow on people. After people have known me for quite some time, a lot of them seem to figure out that I’m actually surprisingly and subtly nice in addition to being ridiculously harmless and treat me accordingly.

Actually people with anxiety disorders are typically the nicest people you ever met. They’re often introverts and that’s sort of the cause of the disorder right there. It’s also driving a lot of the niceness of course. A lot but not all introverts and extremely nice. Almost too nice.

How many people have figured this out? Very few. One thing I noted that a few high-IQ professionals like pharmacists (who mistakenly thought my problem was Social Phobia - close but not quite, though it looks like it), one woman with a high IQ (130), and a female university student somehow all managed to get it. I’ve found that people with high IQ’s can often make sense of the most convoluted and counterintuitive concepts and behaviors that no one else can figure out. That’s one nice thing I value about high IQ types. Of course if you can think like this was a normal IQ that’s awesome, but I just don’t see a lot of it.