It's kind of amazing to sit here and really think about how bad my social anxiety is from various stacked up traumas and CPTSD. Every time I go to say anything to anyone, there is this whole pre-flight checklist it has to go through:
Is there anything in here that's going to give away identifying
information I need to worry about getting into the hands of stalkers? My name, where I am, associations with particular people or projects I've worked with? Any sort of photos of anything are right out.
What about stuff I've always been tight-lipped about but other people might not have been once?
Gotta be careful never to mention my cat by name, some relative might have labeled a photo of him on facebook once.
OK, what about cross-referencing concerns? If I'm telling any sort of personal anecdote, or mentioning that I just saw or read or played something, I need to think about whether I've
mentioned that somewhere that people could crosscheck. And of course, it might be safe now, but what if this forum or this discord or whatever has a stalker sneak in sometime? Sure I use different names everywhere, but if I mention I just watched The Hidden again in two places, that's linkable.
Frequently this leads me to conclude that it's not worth saying something at all publicly, and stick to just one on one messages... but with who?
Once upon a time see, I had what I thought was a nice close friendship with someone, who later it turns out was seriously manipulating/taking advantage
of me, and after I'd outlived my usefulness REALLY threw me under a bus. Like on a my physical safety was compromised sort of level. Gotta be careful about something like that happening again.
Also gotta be careful since hey that person is still in the good graces of nearly everyone I know and if I
reconnect with something, there's a chance they'll be all "hey, you'll never guess who I just talked to!" and next thing you half a dozen stalkers whose radar I dropped off are on high alert again.
And after getting through all of those, which really do all have quite a harrowing story behind each,
then we've just got the general social anxiety stuff. Am I coming of as clingy? Annoying? Talking too much? Too little? Does this person have any interest at all in hearing me go on about Kamen Rider or PCB layouts or my RPG character or whatever? Maybe this person doesn't like talking to me at all
and has actually just done a really good job of feigning interest for the last decade or three.
And of course the ever-present worry- Am I coming off too friendly? Is this gonna read like flirting, trigger some subconscious fear about predatory trans women picked up from constant propaganda maybe?
Anyway yeah, that's the paranoid stew going on in my head at all times pretty much.
You can guess how well that's going with me trying to reconnect with people to see how they're doing for the holidays, while using a new handle they don't know.
