Sep 1

A fear I have overcome, which may be hard to tell, is my crippling fear of people. people to me were always scary because growing up I had met so many different kinds of people. Whether its people from the deep south of Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana or the high rise city's of Chicago and New York city. So many different people have impacted my life from an extraordinarily young age, which now I realize has allowed me to relate too and practically communicate with many many many different people, but as a kid it was scary. I never was able to socialize in pre-k and its led me to develop a permanent disadvantage to socializing because the first friends I had to make on my own I wasn't able too and was bullied by them, some of them attend lakeside even now, seniors just like me. It all began there but people can be violent, judgmental, hateful, and even frightening. I was not able to talk to anyone due to fear of them hating me, I'm not sure why I try and be as nice and polite to everyone I meet. Later that can devolve into horseplay and jokes but I've always kind of been two faced, everything I said or did was like a mimick of other peoples success in socializing, even now most of the things I do are just things I've learned to do socially from observing other people. All of middle school and most of high-school I was completely unable to talk to people more then once without the crushing thought of them talking bad about me, thinking I was annoying them or making them mad, maybe I had something on my face and that's all they where looking at when I was talking to them. one day I remember  coughing when someone was talking briefly and they paused for maybe a split second and I could not stop thinking about it for a week. I never spoke to them again because I assumed they despised me after only talking to them once. It may seem odd but in reality I can never trust someone 100% ever. But I've learned if I be myself a lot of people would like to talk to me and I just shouldn't overthink anything. it seems simple compared to how deep this problem runs but I really really just had a revalation at camp.