By David Phaneuf
As residual noise from the arcade games that surround me blare, I stare up at a drag queen performing a powerful ballad. A smile lights up my face as I stare completely transfixed by the performance that is unfolding in front of me. Anxiety is a strange beast. It digs its claws in during the quiet moments of the day when nothing should be making me feel wrong; yet leaves me untouched as I dance my heart out on the floor of a club. It makes me doubt myself when I should be at my most confident and leaves me unscathed while I stand in the middle of a cheering crowd as the spectacle in motion on stage captivates me. This is the type of situation most people would imagine an anxiety-inducing setting to be; loud music, too many people in too little a space, slight disorientation from one too many Pinot Grigios, yet I am utterly, overwhelmingly fine. My eyes break away from the performance to survey the crowd; every face here *belongs* here, and mine is among them.
Growing up, I suppressed my feelings to the point where I couldn’t accept that I had a crushes on boys, let alone admit it to others. I was anxious about everything; the way I dressed, the way I spoke, when my gaze lingered just a little too long at the cute boy in my Physics class. When I first came out at the age of 17, the thought of being myself in public terrified me. Somehow, I manage to confide in a few close friends towards the end of my senior year, and moving to the University of Rhode Island made to the transition to being out a bit easier, though not entirely without strife.
The first time I walked into the LGBTQ center I stood outside of the door for about 10 minutes, my heart in my throat and my hand reaching for and receding from the door handle about 100 times. Crossing the threshold into that room set in motion a huge change in my life, because within that drab room with old, beat up furniture and posters of gay icons, I was allowed to exist as myself. I was still scared of being known as gay to the general public, but the people who hung out there and attended discussion groups made me feel like I belonged. The more I engaged with the community over the next few years, the more my anxiety around being gay receded. This recession was especially prominent after I turned 21. I went to my first gay bar, I held a boy’s hand in public, and I wore the rainbow flag on myself with pride. I even made a FACEBOOK status about it (imaging that!). I was euphoric, I was confident, and it all came at a great cost.
The community, the clubbing, the bars, the drugs and the alcohol offered me something that I had craved my entire life- human connection. My social isolation and awkwardness as a child made it easily the most addictive thing that I have ever come into contact with. I knew someone wherever I went. I knew the bartenders, the bar-goers, the people smoking outside and the people doing coke in the bathroom, and I immersed myself in all of it. I constantly sought out those intimate moments of human interaction and before I knew it, I was going out 4 or 5 times a week. I went out after work, every Friday and Saturday, every moment I could. My anxiety had morphed into something new.
While growing up these kinds of interactions and social situations would have caused my heart to rise uncomfortably into my throat, but they had become what I lived for. I began to actively fear NOT going out. To be relevant within a community, you must be active in it, and I was scared of becoming irrelevant. At a time when I viewed all human interaction as something special and intimate, losing all of that was unthinkable. You can probably see where this is going. While I was trying desperately to remain in control of this aspect of my life, I was losing control in every other. My mental health was awful, my grades plunged, my performance at work suffered, and none of that mattered as long as I stayed relevant. Everything came to a head when I had to drop out of school and move 100 miles away from the place I loved being. This was the change that needed to happen, but at the time it absolutely crushed me.
Honestly, the rest of this story isn’t that interesting. The change of scenery helped immensely. Being forced away from an atmosphere that was toxic to me helped me gain the insight to self evaluate and come to terms with the fact that I needed to get help. I went to therapy, I got on medication, I got a new job and that pretty much brings things up to today. I recently started going out again, and while old feelings of anxiety around irrelevancy still come up, they’re not overwhelming and I can keep them in check. Honestly, it’s all still a work in progress, but I’m getting to where I need to be one step at a time.