Anxiety, Friendship, & Adulting

A few years ago when I was on unemployment following a medical leave, I decided to participate in a one-day career exploration workshop. I think half the reason is that I like things like personality tests (the other half may have been to convince the unemployment people that I was actually seeking employment at the time, because I definitely didn't feel quite ready to go back to work yet).  Two of the evaluations we completed that day were the ever-popular Myers-Briggs and the less-common-but-still-familiar Holland Code. Unsurprisingly, my Myers-Briggs came out ISFJ (introverted, sensing, feeling, judging), with my strongest trait being introversion at over a 90% preference compared to extroversion. My Holland Code came up as SAI (social, artistic, investigative), with my strongest trait being social. As the lady leading the seminar started making a point that people whose top Holland trait was social are extroverts, I shared my own result, having to further explain that not only was I a social introvert, but my introversion score was extremely high. The seminar leader looked at me like I was an alien and quickly changed the topic. I think she was flustered by my existence.
I've long described myself as a social introvert - I love being around people, but they wear me out. Throw in some Social Anxiety Disorder, and you have the perfect paradox of a person. Recently that paradox has grown even more complex as I've come to accept the number one tool in my anxiety management: surrounding myself with people. I mean, not just any people - they have to be the type of people by whom I feel loved and accepted enough to dare to take off my masks of perfection long enough to relax and simply be myself. And when I say "surround myself" with such a group of people, I mean this fairly literally - not that they have to physically surround me 24/7, but they have to be people that I see on a regular basis. I've always had people in my life who have cared about me, but when location or incompatible schedules keep up from seeing each other or talking (as in real, semi-lengthy conversations), their love and encouragement often doesn't help as much as I wish it would.
It actually kind of makes sense that the best way to manage my anxiety is to surround myself with a solid support system of people. Having Social Anxiety Disorder is less a fear of people themselves and more a fear of their rejection (and the possible repercussions of that rejection). Anxiety brain is all too good at convincing me that I'm worthless and unlovable; it's also a horrible judge of whether people in the rest of the world have any positive view of me. I spend large chunks of each day telling anxiety brain to shut up (literally - on the list of things heard yelled in my kitchen last weekend were "Anxiety brain, shut up!"). If my voice and rational brain's voice are the only ones I hear fighting back, and, at least according to anxiety brain, the whole world is saying the opposite, my own positive and hopeful voices get drowned out. I need to hear others express that I'm valued and loved and worthwhile; their voices do a much better job of drowning out anxiety brain. It's not that I'm that self-centered and attention-seeking - it's that I literally can't fight anxiety brain alone. I've tried. Many times. I've failed. Many times.
What remains is how to make sure I'm continually surrounded by those people. I was pretty lucky growing up. I had a solid group of friends from childhood all the way through high school, with some additions and subtractions along the way. During much of that time, my anxiety remained highly functioning. In college it was harder to make friends, and anxiety got worse, particularly through each of the two occasions where my friend groups of the time exploded. Then I became an adult - which seems to complicate the friend-making process even more - and anxiety symptoms took a turn from highly functional to "I'm just trying to survive the next minute." As an adult, the peaks and valleys of my anxiety management can be mapped pretty clearly with how strong of a support system I have among people that I see on a regular basis. Initially, seeing as I was a new teacher, the workaholic in me relied on my colleagues for this. Turns out, it was very hit-or-miss, and it made for some particularly rocky situations during the times that I've spent in toxic work environments. So now work colleagues don't get to join my support system until after they've proven trustworthy over a long period of time. I needed to find friends outside of work.
If there were a class called "Adulting 101," one of the topics on the syllabus would be "How do I make grown-up friends?" Any time that I talk to my childhood and college friends (who are spread across the country), we talk about the same types of struggles in trying to form friendships with people we see on a regular basis. The number one method to making grown-up friends seems to be joining an activity that you love because doing so allows you to find people who have something in common with you. It took me a few years into adulthood before I let myself focus less on work and take some time to involve myself in other activities. And eventually through activities, I started building new friendships.
Here's the question that no one ever answers, though: What do you do when the activity comes to an end? How are the friendships sustainable when you no longer see those people on a regular basis?
These questions feel more complex to me as I battle anxiety brain - at almost 29 years old, I have yet to figure out the difference between anxiety brain and reality when it comes to trying to build and sustain new friendships. Clearly, friendship is a two-way street that takes an effort to maintain - but what if I become a nuisance? What if my internal desperation to stay connected to people I value surfaces and I come off as needy and clingy? When is someone an acquaintance whose company I can enjoy within the bounds of a structured activity, and when are they a friend that I can invite to grab coffee or a meal or just hang out with? When there exists an age difference, who is a friend, and who is a mentor, and what are those boundaries when we're both adults? And, while we're at it, how does an extreme introvert who doesn't know how to do small talk but loves meaningful conversation try to build friendships with extroverts without scaring them off by doing something like sitting down and saying "So, what's your life story?" (Which I've stopped myself from doing so many times in the last year - scratch that, month - it's ridiculous, but then conversation falls flat and fizzles and goes nowhere because small talk has always seemed to meaningless to me that I never learned how to do it). What are the questions I'm allowed to ask to get to know someone better, and which ones are prying too much? To top it all off, which of these questions are anxiety brain, which ones are part of being a clueless Millennial, and which ones are a normal part of the growing up process?
When I'm not in an anxiety-induced isolation mode, I actually really like spending time with people, even if they do wear me out. One of my favorite activities in life is learning about people and their stories - and it's so much more fun when it's real people standing in front of me than it is when it's fictional characters, celebrities, or historical figures. I want to spend time with people, want to get to know them, and will probably remember more about them than they'd like me to sometimes - but only because they matter to me.
Lately I struggle with something I haven't for a long time, and don't generally experience as an introvert: loneliness. I've been burned enough times at work, and have had a transient enough career, that I find little connection there; I mean, I love my students and care about them deeply, but they're no replacement for grown-up friends. The older I get, the more it seems that most people around me go home to their families and established circles of friends. I, on the other hand, go home to my dog (who is great company but not so great for conversation). And anxiety brain can't figure out who is a good enough friend or friend-in-the-making that I'm allowed to text or call or ask if they want to hang out without being an intrusion into their life at best (and a total creeper at worst). On the good days, this leaves me feeling lonely. On the bad days, I feel paralyzed by anxiety, knowing that I'm in desperate need of immediate support system interference with no clue who I'm allowed to reach out to, including the people who keep telling me to reach out. On both types of days, I wind up sitting at home, too afraid to make the wrong move, and proceed to get way too excited about every Facebook notification that rolls through and count down the days to my next scheduled social event.
Unfortunately, with my school year activity wrapping up its final gatherings and my summer activity cancelled, I'm quickly running out of structured social gatherings to look forward to. It makes me panic a little bit - enough so that I, who feel really uncomfortable being the center of attention, almost considered planning a birthday gathering for myself as an excuse to spend time with people (until I realized that the Lynx have a home game that night, and as a season ticket holder, that's hard to skip). But I need to figure something out soon, because I've done the summer-of-loneliness while job hunting thing before, and it wasn't pretty, and I would really rather not do it again. So here's hoping that I manage to figure out this whole friendship aspect of adulting thing without anxiety getting in the way. Because as much as I can laugh at myself in good humor for all of the ridiculous-sounding questions above, right now would be a good time to start finding the answers to some of them.