Diagnoses aren’t one and done. Look up the criteria and honestly reflect on it for days, weeks. Also check out diagnoses with overlapping symptoms.

Finally, your diagnosis will change as you do the self care and work to get better.

Uhhh, I don’t even know how to frame it

So, i am having a “big sad” also, probably for years with it’s becoming gradually worse, as i feel myself

Solution? Well… I don’t know, im using escapism (and perhaps junk food) to be just here

But, i guess we, the communists are here for each other, so untill capitalism dies, or i die in attempt to destroy capitalism - i am not going anywhere

social anxiety disorder with depression

my friend…the same thing i have…i was afraid that meds would make me a happy zombie, but you have to learn that antidepressants just take the sadness off, but don’t make you happy, you make yourself happy. you can keep being a communist, little steps are better than no steps

Taking care of yourself is important. Hopefully the psychiatrist can prescribe you something that will make socializing a little bit easier.

After that, accept that you are going to make small steps. Calling yourself a failure rarely helps. Think of it like exercise. You don’t start out strong or fast. You get there slowly.

Find someone you can chat with. It’s okay if it’s online only and has nothing to do with Communism. Go to a restaurant alone. Find anything that makes you a bit uncomfortable and do it. It doesn’t matter that these aren’t directly furthering the cause. With time, things will get a bit easier.

Insert here the pun about “big sad” and SAD

I’m generally a social anxious person myself, though I’d advise to “do as I say and not as I do” because my main coping mechanism is comical amounts of alcohol lol. There’s some pretty good social anxiety medication out there, but it’s important to use them as a tool and not as a crutch. Social anxiety can be managed through psychological and physical techniques, so over-relying on external chemicals can end up making it worse due to lack of training.

For my more advisable coping mechanisms, I tend to rehearse interactions well in advance and plan when I am doing “social” carefully. If socialising happens during the specific socialising timeframe I’m ready for, it works out better. Another really important skill is being able to say “no” to things that fall outside of what you’re comfortable with. If anybody asks me to do “social” without prior notice, they’ll probably get a “no I’m busy” unless I’m in a good enough mood. The language of disability can sometimes be useful too, you can say you’re “not feeling well” or “sick” or whatever and people won’t bother you that much. If it’s bad enough for the DSM, it’s bad enough for you as an individual to feel no shame over it.

For the low-level stuff, find small habits that get you some breathing room. I don’t like most fidget toys because they look like children stuff, so I usually carry a lighter that I can feel with my hands as a subtle way to ground myself. Cheap pens, jewellery, earrings can work too. You can also go drink water or to the bathroom (those two work well together lol) whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, which is also good for your health anyway. If you have any close friends in your organisation you can tell them about it and ask them to provide social cover if you just need to get up and go on a walk randomly. Though I’d advise actually not getting too intimate in politics because it’s a risky proposition. Also, as a smoker, I advise you to not start smoking either tobacco or cannabis. The first might relieve your social anxiety but it’ll obviously ruin your health, while the latter is less destructive but will actually make you more anxious in the long run.

I’m currently also paying attention to how my food habits impact my mood. Not sure if that’s just a “me” thing, but might be worth taking note if you get more or less socially anxious given what types of food you’ve eaten.

Edit: also organising doesn’t always have to be about socialising. I’ve done both a lot of really tiring social tasks that required me to interact daily with over a hundred people (worst period of my life!), but also really solitary tasks involving documentation, reading, writing, programming and such. Sadly small organisations kinda require everybody to be a jack-of-all-trades, but a good division of labour when possible can both be more accommodating and actually more effective.

as someone with years of experience both having and finally overcoming social anxiety and depression, i have a few things to say

i wouldn’t get caught up on labels and diagnoses too much. psychiatry can sometimes pathologize normal, rational human behavior. in my experience it also made it seem like i would be stuck with my diagnoses for life, which i don’t think is necessarily the case, either.

it feels like conscious brain knows what I should be doing as a communist, but my subconscious instinct over protects me and prevents me from actually being able to be social and organize and such.

this is exactly, exactly what i felt, and i felt a lot of shame as a result of my values not being in alignment with my actions. but, a central aspect of marxism is that humans (and really all living beings) are inherently rational, that we react rationally to our material conditions in accordance with our material interests. i was forced to investigate my own history and why i had learned to be so scared of other people, and why i had learned to think so little of myself, so that i could then change myself in the present. this was a process that took several years and was very challenging, but was absolutely worth it because i feel like it tackled the underlying contradiction instead of the surface level symptoms.

and then on top of that, i’ve found that even still (like anything else) thinking positively and socially interacting with other people is a skill that can be learned. i have a much easier time learning it after resolving those issues from my past, but resolving those issues didn’t magically give me those skills either. taking things one step at a time, setting very small and achievable goals for myself has been what i’m working on: like saying hello or making eye contact with at least one stranger in a day, being around strangers a little more often, trying my best to reframe negative thoughts, etc

finally, i just want to say that with all the horrible things going on in the world and all the emphasis put on organization (rightly so), it can be so easy to think that because of your internal problems that you’re not a good enough communist, or that you’re not a communist in practice. but i think there are so many of us that are bogged down by mental health struggles such that sometimes being the best communist you can be literally entails tackling your mental health struggles head on. self care is valuable reproductive labor. this is how i’ve reframed the guilt i used to feel for being forced to work on myself for a time

hope you feel better soon, comrade.