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Brendan Cahill's avatar

The Irishman in me likes the getaway car 🚗 concept!

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Ralph Rickenbach's avatar

As I said in other places, I truly enjoyed the first candlelit or Candlelight Sunday chat (it seems that the name has not been decided upon quite yet, as I see both in use).

Though I hardly ever experience anxiety, it is always interesting to learn how other people experience and handle it. While I am neither anxious nor shy, I experience the drain of energy associated with introversion in social settings of a certain size.

I distinguish anxiety from fear. Anxiety is rather unspecific, while fear knows a causal object. Stage fright is an example of anxiety because we do not know what we are afraid of specifically.

In the rare cases that I have been anxious, it helped me to try to define what I was truly afraid of. Typically, I was unable to pinpoint the object of fear and gave up on my anxiety. When I found out the root cause of my anxiety, I imagined the worst-case scenarios. They usually turned out laughably inconsequential.

What do I mean? I lived through the divorce of my parents, being put into a boarding home, and being forced to prostitute myself in the gay community as a teenager. My daughter ran away and was almost killed by her boyfriend multiple times before she escaped. My elder son was almost killed in a car accident, and it took 12 years for him to recover. My younger son was so traumatized by this that he lived on the street for a few years. I lived through 3 bankruptcies (by my employers), 4 bore-outs, cancer, and almost died of lung embolisms. I lost 99% of my social contacts and subculture when I was thrown out of church for not mindlessly accepting the doctrine and succumbing to leadership. Apart from my wife and my children, 2 people kept a relationship. What is there left to be anxious about? And I can assure you: all this can be survived and life still is beautiful.

I am not making light of anybody's experience. We all have our thresholds of what we can take in different places. I am just talking about my own experience here.

I am looking forward to the next chat- I hope that we will talk more about introversion per se, but again, I have expressed this in other places.

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