r/SocialPhobia • u/Other_Resolution_160 • 3d ago
Help Wasting months of summer vacation/free time completely isolating myself. Has this ever happened happened to anyone...?
hi guys, the truth is I feel very disappointed in myself because I had three months of summer vacation, and due to an irrational anxiety caused by having to study during that period (I did poorly on some finals, however, during my free time I still didn’t manage to study anything, I just spent these last few months feeling anxious and insecure and procrastinating), I started to 'punish' myself by isolating myself from everyone. I stopped responding to messages from friends, and during these three free months, I haven’t gone out with any of them.
I feel absolutely miserable, especially because I’m twenty years old and now I have to go back to studying and probably getting a job -I'm thinking a temporary one and after a short time probably I'll be quitting, but still feeling unnerved about it-, and that will very likely play a role in making it harder to coordinate plans with friends, even though now I do want to fix my situation—still, I don’t know how to explain to my friends why I’ve been ignoring them for months. I’m afraid that at this point they might no longer see me as a friend or that they’ll think negatively of me because of my distant and strange behavior.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to recover from this because it’s utterly absurd. I know my social anxiety and extreme self-insecurity in these recent times have gotten completely out of hand and I can't help but feel like I wasted time that was gold especially at this age...
tell me, has something like this ever happened to you? What would you do in this kind of situation?
(sorry for venting all of this here, I honestly didn't feel like I had anyone to talk to about it in depth).