Abraham

My grandmother has a green thumb. It makes sense I guess, she grew up in el campo with a father who cut sugar cane and practiced subsistence farming.
My mother, breaking the rule about traits skipping generations, also has a green thumb. But the third generation (or me) is very good at making leaves fall of trees and making things go from green to brown... even my one of my lucky bamboo started dying on me, making me wonder about the state of my luck...
Anyhow, I have this little bonsai tree purchased from Ikea on a whim this past summer that I keep killing. Every time I think it's dead, it sprouts a few leaves here and there. It's probably on its third life right now, after my brothers spent Thanksgiving asking me whether the tree had shed its leaves for the winter time. So I've finally fallen so into amazement at my little tree's persistence in staying alive and being reborn that I've become a faithful waterer, and I look at my little tree (which I've decided to name Abraham) everyday and root for it to thrive. And where I get philosophical with this is that I've started to identify with my little tree and trying to help it thrive has come to be like trying to help me thrive. I realize this needs an explanation.
So, for a little bit over a year now, I've been dealing with the fact that people make me nervous as I like to call it. According to the DSM IV and a psychologist, I fit the following criteria:

A. A marked and persistent fear of one or more social and performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. The individual fears that he or she will act in a way (or show anxiety symptoms) that will be humiliating or embarrassing.
B. Exposure to the feared social situation almost invariably provokes anxiety, which may take the form of a situationally bound or predisoposed Panic Attack.
In feared social or performance situations, individuals with Social Phobia experience concerns about embarrassment and are afraid that others will judge them to be anxious, weak, "crazy," or stupid. They may fear public speaking because of concern that others will notice their trembling hands or voice or they may experience extreme anxiety when conversing with others because of fear that they will appear inarticulate. They may fear public speaking because of concern that others will notice their trembling hands or voice or they may experience extreme anxiety when conversing with others because of a fear of being embarrassed by having others see their hands shake. Individuals with Social Phobia almost always experience symptoms of anxiety (e.g., palpitations, tremors, sweating, gastrointestinal discomfort, diarrhea, muscle tension, blushing, confusion) in the feared social situations, and, in severe cases, these symptoms may meet the criteria for a Panic Attack. Blushing may be more typical of Social Phobia.
C. The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable.
D. The feared social or performance situation are avoided or else are endured with intense anxiety or distress
E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress in the feared social or performance situation(s) interferes significantly with the person's normal routine, occupational (academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, or there is marked distress about having the phobia.
F. In individuals under age 18 years, the duration is at least 6 months
G. The fear or avoidance is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition and is not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., Panic Disorder With or Without Agoraphobia, Separation Anxiety Disorder, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, a Pervasive Developmental Disorder, or Schizoid Personality Disorder).
H. If a general medical condition or another mental disorder is present, the fear in Criterion A is unrelated to it, e.g., the fear is not of Stuttering, trembling in Parkinson's disease, or exhibiting abnormal eating behavior in Anorexia Nervosa or Bulimia Nervosa

which means people making me nervous is officially an anxiety disorder called Social Phobia.
Now I've always had a bit of an issue with public speaking and getting nervous talking to authority figures, but in the past year and a half it did get to the point of avoidance (and blushing, and palpitations, and tremors)-- not talking to a professor about a grading error because the idea of it made me so nervous, not presenting an extra-credit presentation because I didn't want to stand in front of a group, etc, etc. I was trying to deal with it on my own for a while because, well mainly it was a lack of health insurance thing, but also psychological things do seem like they should be in your control. If I know my fear is irrational, then why can't I just tell myself that and change, right? But that's just not the way it works.
The way I like to think of it at this moment is that people's threshold's for different things are different. Like some people have a lower pain threshold than others. Well, I think I have a lower sympathetic nervous system trigger than other people maybe. It takes less to set off my stress reaction. I've always had a low trigger for this kind of stress but then I guess experience made my trigger think it was right in being so sensitive, so it decided to be even more so. And now I'm trying to reset it. So there I get back to Abraham.
I feel like these past few months, I've been focused a lot in getting back to where I was at when I felt the most confident-- in New York. I've gone to counseling, I take medication, I try to take steps to get comfortable with things again such as not taking meds for my last small group presentation and my last patient interview (woo hoo!!!). I, like Abraham, am struggling to put new leaves out and get back to a better me. Sometimes things are better (like getting coaxed into reading my poetry and having it be alright) and sometimes things are worse (like hanging back at a party or social setting until I have a drink-- self medication) but I'm working at it and hopefully I'll get to my second life soon...

And a last by the way-- I decided to post about this because there is such a stigma with psychological disorders (why disorders? i like uniquenesses) and it's a whole vicious circle because the people going through it feel stigma about it themselves and so hide it. So I decided to put it all out there in a little attempt at destigmatizing...