I remember how life was like when I wasn't anxious most of the time. It was when I was a student, life for the next five, eight years was already laid out. Just education after education, school after school. The path is guaranteed. I could think about the scary adult world with jobs and interviews later. It's all so far away, all that matters right now is showing up for classes and doing well on my exams.

But time marches on.

I did everything I could to avoid thinking about becoming an adult as I got closer and closer to graduation. It didn't help that for the last stretch of my education, I stopped caring and doing anything useful at all. By graduation, I was wholly unqualified for the technical diploma I carried. I had the cert, but I didn't actually remember anything I learned or showcase anything useful in my resume or my life.

I continued to be a NEET for three years.

I was so scared out going outside and finding out that I wasn't good enough. I was so afraid of other people, outside, rejection, I stopped and did nothing at all. I wholly bought into whatever fearmongering narrative that perpetuated online at whatever time.

"Getting a job now is hard because of COVID."

"Getting a job now is bad because we're in a recession."

"Being an adult is constant pain at work everyday all day."

I just took whatever negativity uttered online by my countrymen and decided that I wanted to avoid all of that. I don't want to become a wage slave, spending 9 hours (plus unpaid overtime, since they said it is common) at work 5 days a week doing things I don't like or care about, while being treated horribly by my superiors, and dealing with office politics the entire time with my colleagues. All there was were the negatives.

"I'm not good enough."

Enough is enough.

I'm done being in this loop of anxiety, catastrophizing, and then putting myself down at any slight perception of a mistake or social error. I'm tired of being fragile, defensive and overly sensitive.

Things really aren't that deep.

"Oh I don't know how to dress femininely and professionally enough for interviews" is not something that immediately means "I'm too abnormal to be like everyone else, the normals who have everything come so easily to them. reeee." It's not that deep. Not being able to do something doesn't mean that I'm less than.

Though it sucks that whenever I do encounter something like this I instinctively feel hurt and defensive. Will that go away when I see myself making a lot of mistakes and just sitting with that hurt? Because naturally what happens is that I obviously improve the more I do something, and then the hurt goes away as I get better (since being better = not being less than), which re-confirms the internal bias that being bad at something means feeling bad and less than.

I really don't know how I'll do it. But I'm done. I'm tired. I want to change the way my body and mind measures my self worth. Because none of how it does right now makes any sense.