The feeling of being on a roller coaster when it rushes you past the trees and blurs your surroundings, when you do sharp turns or sudden drops, the vertigo hits you from all those twists and turns. Imagine feeling that way, all while standing still in a crowd, or even while waiting in line to order that grande white chocolate mocha you've been hyping yourself up for all day. It's a mixture of excitement and nervousness, with a hint of lightheadedness.

The sweaty palms, the nervous looks you give to your fellow peers who are waiting in line. Then, when you get up to the cashier to make your order, that smiling face turns into a person who's judging you for stuttering out your order. In order to calm yourself down, you act like you hadn't already figured out what you wanted to order. You glance over the menu for the millionth time, giving that nervous laugh to the menacing cashier, then stumbling over your order even though you'd rehearsed what you would say since you got in line.

Living with social anxiety makes the struggle to be an adult even harder than it should be. Calling the doctor's office to make an appointment for that check-up you were supposed to have a month ago seems like crossing a canyon with a swamp filled with alligators. Even ordering your food at a restaurant makes your palms sweaty and your face turn red, because all you can think about is the waitress judging you for stumbling over your words. There are so many irrational fears running through my mind, and I can’t stop them, no matter how hard I try.

You’re afraid of picking where to go out to eat, because the others will disapprove, or rejection. Growing up in high school, the fear of not fitting in was constantly there for me and many others. You’re too anxious to enter conversations because you don’t know what to talk about, or maybe you feel like you don’t have anything to talk about. Even the smallest of things will set off the overwhelming anxiety. Simply driving to school can make me anxious, because I don’t know what will happen while I’m driving. What if someone decides to pull out in front of me and I can’t react fast enough?

Meetings for school or work can cause the same feelings; you feel anxious and don’t know what to expect, even though there are the same meetings every month. They have the same amount of information, you talk about the same things, but you still cannot calm down that part of you that worries about being called on during the meetings to answer a question. Even in class, when you’re listen and being quiet, the teacher may ask you a question, and you get this rush of anxiety. You can’t figure out what the answer is, even though you just wrote it down a few minutes ago.

Even though it is highly frustrating to deal with, I’ve been able to counter-act it with humor. Once you are able to laugh at yourself, you can use the stumbles and nerves as a pro instead of a con. You can just smile and do your best to at least look at the waitress once or twice when speaking your order. When ordering that coffee, just smile and ask how they are today to get the focus off of you just for one second so you can collect your mind and shoo the fog away. I remind myself that I am not the only one out there dealing with this overwhelming feeling, and I try to make friends even though I’m somewhat awkward at the beginning.