It's so lonely, empty and hard with this condition.

You'd think someone with agoraphobia for five years might get a response other than disbelief, confusion or disgust but people still don't understand it.

But my whole life so far has been shaped -continuously narrowed- by anxiety.

How can my personal life experience of engrained terror and resulting complete inability to be able to talk to other people be met by confusion and disbelief?

How do you cope with effectively most of the world dismissing what's been controlling, torturing and ruining you (in only slightly different forms) for as long as you can remember?

When your occupational therapist, who feels like your last possible hope, someone who might actually have an understanding of anxiety disorders... says "well we all get anxious, I get nervous about getting lost?"

Obviously I understand that everyone has their own anxities and insecurities and that they're not easy to deal with, but to compare this with a very physically affecting social phobia, that's resulted in severe depression and all sorts that has destroyed my life and left me unable to contribute in any way... is not only massively offensive and upsetting, it's dangerous and harmful.

How can you not become completely misanthropic when you realise you are truly on your own with a fucking monster of an illness?

If I didn't have a severe social phobia I would have friendships.

I would have finished school after A levels, I would have hopefully gone on to university.

I would have never been kept in an inpatient unit, which felt like imprisonment for a year in the middle of my adolescence.

With a degree I would have had more of a chance of finding work.

Without these problems I could be in public without feeling completely frozen, dissociated and petrified that someone may acknowledge me in some way. I might be seen as someone other than a child (I'm 24 now, for fucks sake) or (in the eyes of others) a stupid nervous freak. I could say another word to a person apart from my boyfriend (who I am endlessly appreciative for, please don't get me wrong). It's so tiring to live life being petrified and wary of everything.

I could be out in the world feeling like my personality hadn't been eaten away. I could start a conversation.

I wouldn't have to be constantly aware that (uncontrollably) my body language keeps everyone away, whatever I do.

I would be able to leave my house freely. I wouldn't feel an excruitating fear and discomfort anytime a person was even near me on the street, I could be outside without getting tunnel vision and having and stimulation make me jump out of my skin. People could get near me without me flinching. I could make eye contact with people.

I could enjoy things.

My family wouldn't see me as a lost cause and an embarassment.

Society doesn't seem to realise how destructive it's fixation on confidence is.

If you are lacking in it, people will sniff it out, avoid you, attack you, continously criticise, run you down more and more and more, categorise you, treat you like nothing and then when you are so broken from it you eventually shut yourself away from the world to protect yourself from going over the edge.

Then you might become agoraphobic and people will say "you just have to get out there."

When all you needed for years when you were "out there" was for someone to look past your discomfort and give you the time of day. The fucking backwardness of it.

NOTE- You can't materialise confidence out of nowhere. You need people to not treat you like shit then maybe we will be the people that we were or could be.