Social anxiety isn't about being liked

Not OP. It's not about the words or the intentions, it's about the fact that we can talk about anything in the world, do any activity together, and you want to do something I'm not comfortable with.

That said, I understand relationships are about give and take. I couldn't be in a romantic relationship like this, but I'll indulge my friends or my cousins. I have a friend who engages in "countersignaling" often. Our connection is generally worth the uncomfortableness, but sometimes it is unbearable.

As friends of mine who I consider popular have suggested to me “don’t give a fuck what people think about you”, and this blog says that in a much longer form.

As someone who was extensively bullied as a kid, including with physical violence, my social anxiety went through the roof and it has taken me a long time and awareness of my trauma to heal from those wounds to the point I no longer have social anxiety.

The world is sadly full of miserable cruel people who want to put me down so they can no longer have to deal with their own feelings of inferiority. I have made friends who truly love me for who I am, who give me space to talk, who do not constantly put me down in cruel ways (yes, I once had “friends” like that), and who truly care about my feelings, but it has taken a lot of work to get there. I can now sniff out someone who is starting to engage in bullying behavior, and block them from being in my life.

> Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away

I hope not, I don't want to be hooked on some prescription meds eg. what about exposure therapy

I do wonder if being nervous to talk to a hot girl is the same as social anxiety I mean I'm not the jock/main attention guy either but I can talk to strangers (guys or not attractive women)

Neither "wanting to be liked" or "wanting to avoid being disliked" rings true to me, at least as applied to my own social anxiety. I want to avoid being thought of at all. The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked. Possibly more so. Every relationship with another person, positive or negative, is another cognitive burden to maintain. I would vastly prefer most of my interactions to just remain at the default/stranger level where I can re-use the same anticipatory model for most people I deal with.

Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.

I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her. Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.

I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.