Dear Peaches:

My comment is on two issues:

1. The introvert/extrovert connection to anxiety: you identified yourself to be an introvert and you explained what it means, for you: “when I get around a group of people I sink into my comfort zone become quiet. I have to warm up or feel things out in order to engage”-

I used to think that extroverted people are people without anxiety. It is only recently that I learned that it is not necessarily so. It easily looks like confidence, like lack of fear from the introvert’s point of view. But it happens that an extrovert is not a person who is confident and free of fear, but a fearful, anxious person who instead of withdrawing into himself (or herself), rushes out, blurts out, expresses. Maybe later on he or she plays back what he said, criticizing himself for having said it, laments about what people thought about him and so on. But at the moment, when in the group of people she rushed through the fear into that extroverted behavior. Just like the introvert is not “in the moment”, withdrawing, so are many of the extroverted, not in the moment, rushing ahead.

2. On anxiety, how common it is and healing. You wrote: “I have not walked completely into my womanhood to where I have total confidence in who I am as a person and NO FEAR’- I don’t know if there is a single person in the world who has “total confidence…NO FEAR”. Maybe there is a single person, maybe two. Maybe more. But who are these people and how is it that I never met them or heard them or read from them… Maybe I will someday.

Having experienced tons of anxiety myself over decades, I do believe, from very personal experience, that healing from anxiety is possible and available for us, humans. It takes perseverance through the long, long process, lots of patience. I do experience less anxiety but more awareness of every bit of it that I am still experiencing.

anita