Don’t call on me: First week of class is nerve-wrecking

Milam's Musings, milambc@miamioh.edu

There's no surer way to create loneliness than the internalized mantra, "They just won't get it."

The "they" is everyone else. The "it" is the struggles within all of us. But as David Foster Wallace says, "Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

Sure, everyone struggles, but they don't struggle like me in this particular way. Thus, "they just won't get it," then becomes the uncrossable bridge constructed between yourself and other humans.

Communication to me is like diving into a ball pit trying to find the penny at the bottom. It's hard, it's suffocating and I'm not good at it. I've never been good at it.

My family knows this all too well, although fittingly, it's an unspoken knowing. Some select friends are able to engineer the bridge to make that connection.

Otherwise, I wallow in my Wallaceesque belief that my pain is unique, despite knowing to the contrary it most certainly is not. Silent sufferers abound.

Indeed, this trap I fall into is no more relevant or heightened than in the first week of class. And the second, third, fourth; you get the point, but let's focus on the first.

As it happens, the loneliest I ever feel is when I'm around a lot of people. Like in a classroom in Oxford.

The classroom is that ball pit manifest, except the balls are hissing snakes. New people, new faces, new connections run into old fears, old doubts and old anxiety.

I just want to relax. I want to allow my mind the cushiony belief that it's safe - that it's free to learn, that it's okay.

Instead, my mind is rampant with the endless thoughts of social survival; put your hands there, eyes that way, don't breathe too loud, don't sit over there, dear god I hope he doesn't call on me, don't call on me, don't call on me.

He called on me. Now my brain is in overdrive sending a flood of worrying lurches to my stomach, overwhelming my sweat glands and doing funky business with my vocal chords.

Worst of all, my face reveals all of this with an unmistakable, hot burgundy, announcing, "Ha, this loser's scared at something so benign!"

Learning, something I find innately good and thirst for, exists under this pall of anxiety. I can never give myself over fully to it, no matter how desperately I yearn to do so.

I marvel at people in my classes that speak with such confidence and in a way, such nonchalance. As in, doing so is no brave or courageous act for them. Whereas no matter what, speaking in public, even merely to say, "Hi, I'm Brett," requires summoning the embers of courage smoldering somewhere within me.

To those uninitiated to this social existence, such descriptions and sentences not only seem dramatic, but altogether foreign. See, it's already creeping up. Lurking behind my attempt to explain it is a defeatism. The temptation to go, "You just don't understand."

Allow me, then, to be even more concrete with some casual parlance: You people scare the crap out of me. All the time. Without even meaning to of course.

I'm not good at communicating just how hard it is for me to appear normal in social settings. My best friend - the pen - helps get toward the truth of the matter.

Laying down ink, as it were, is like lighting candles in the deepest parts of our minds for others to see. In a previous column, I did this, lending my ink largely to the issue of public speaking. Whelp, that column is still relevant.

This semester, I have a course that I must take as a requirement of my major in philosophy. While listening to Portishead (an English band that's been around forever, which I've only now just discovered; try out "Roads," "Glory Box" and "Humming"), I got a notification of an email from the instructor on my phone.

Something something blah blah presentation blah blah something something. My brain honed in on presentation, sent the usual fear to my stomach and then the action plan: I'll drop the class. A familiar action plan that's been put into place more times than I care to count in my college career.

Then the familiar self-loathing that accompanies this cowardice came in suffocating waves. The self-pity was strong and stayed with me for a few days. I was frustrated and quite frankly, exhausted at this recurring battle with social anxiety.

School had and has taken on the characterization of this battle and therefore, it has a negative connotation. School is not something to be excited about, but rather to dread.

But, I haven't canceled and I won't. Even as I write this, my stomach rolls with nerves. I will take the class and do the presentations.

Maybe I'll survive contrary to my brain's insistence that I've signed my death warrant.

There was no epiphany. I didn't find courage through a Portishead lyric or anything. Life is never so clean; it doesn't gift wrap the path one ought to take for you. You just "do" and hope for the best.

And, I guess, I'm just tired of being a victim to myself.

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