How to interact with Steve, a guide by Steve. Part One: Background.

There are two major pieces of background you need to know about.


1) I am an introvert. 


As a majority of the people in this part of the world are extroverts and have no idea what is up with introverts, I will start here as a place to get to common ground. While this wikipedia article is a much more in depth explanation, I'll give a TL;DR here. 


Introversion/extroversion is on a sliding scale, but I am heavily on the introversion side. An introvert, to quote that article, is "the state of or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life." That means introverts are people who find it more rewarding to read a book than go out to a bar. If you go to a wild party and you come out of the party energized and happy, you're almost certainly an extrovert. If you go to a wild party and come out exhausted and ready to go home and recharge, the inverse is almost certain. Extroverts gain energy when with other people while introverts lose energy. Don't take this to mean that introverts can't like wild parties, far from it, it's just that being around people is harder for extroverts. 


An introvert can sit alone and read a book for hours and hours and be fully engaged where an extrovert may find being alone for that long boring. An introvert may have a boring desk at work that doesn't encourage conversation where an extrovert may have candies at their desk specifically to try to get people to come by and talk. An introvert may find it difficult to go try an activity that they have no experience with and know no one at, where an extrovert might jump at the opportunity.


I have to stress here that there is nothing wrong with being an introvert. Western societies tend to reward extroversion, and are generally biased against introverts (see the wikipedia article for more details), but that doesn't mean introversion is bad. It's just different. 


2) I have an anxiety disorder.


This other wikipedia article will give you more information, but I have this disorder, a generalized anxiety disorder to be more specific. To quote the article, "Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable and often irrational worry about everyday things that is disproportionate to the actual source of worry." What does this mean? As an example, before drugs and therapy the thought that I might not have locked my front door either at night or after I left for work might have driven me crazy. Or if I forgot to shave in the morning, it could bug me intensely all day, enough to distract me from almost anything I was doing including my job.


Basically, with GAD, fear and anxiety ruled my life. Worrying about anything and everything all day long is exhausting, yet that same worrying could keep me from sleeping which would make me irritable. If you knew me before the drugs and therapy, you knew I was basically permanently irritable. One of the reasons I was much more of a drinker when I was younger, I realize now, was because the only time I wasn't anxious was when I was too drunk to care. In retrospect I am very lucky I didn't end up an alcoholic.


Though drugs and therapy I learned how not to let anxiety rule my life. Even when off my drugs, I can usually control the anxiety of daily life to a much better degree than I did before. However, I will always have to be aware of anxiety and fight against it. I hope someday to be able decrease or even completely stop my drugs, but that's a long slow process if it is even possible.


So there you go. This is the necessary background for the context of the rest of these posts to make sense. If you have any other questions you'd like to ask me, feel free, I'm happy to explain.