They call it 'social fatigue'

It seems that I'm not ready to jump into Steemit and hit the ground running.

After just a few days of being so active socially last week (albeit just online), I feel such exhaustion that it gives me anxiety every time I think about it. I've held off for these last few days to see if the feeling will go away. But it's still there.

I always start to think about how my posts are doing and I should do my best to promote them, but this huge ball of stress always starts to expand inside my chest. I even feel like it's affecting how I interact with other people in my life. It feels like it's too easy for people to reach me and I just feel like I want to majorly disconnect from the world. I'd probably thrive as a cave-dweller (but I'm a big fan of electricity and plumbing, so I guess that's out).

To be completely honest, I've never been very extroverted, be it in real life or online. I always talk about this with people who claim that they are introverts. We'd agree about it being hard to make friends, to start a conversation, to escape the politeness trap, and all of the uncertainties inside our heads when we meet new people. But then, I realized most of them were agreeing because they're just good at making friends themselves and they just got me as a new one. It would always feel like a betrayal of sorts, like in my head I would be going, "I thought it was you and me against the world!" I guess I was naive.

Back to how this relates to my current social fatigue, I think my system got a shock from being exposed to interactions with people for those three days that I tried to be more friendly than usual on Steemit.

On average, I normally interact with my family (my sister, mom, and dad whom I live with) at least twice a day during meal times, but even that is sporadic at best (I skip meals). I do also have two best friends that I go to whenever I need them and this happens every other week (and only through smart-ass texts).

I talk with my supervisor at work (through a Skype call), but that's just once a week and my mind excuses the interaction as a work thing. Though I do think I am warming up to her and she me.

But those are periodic and gradual socializing in which I could find my comfort zone easily and where I only rarely go out of.

I feel a huge pressure to commit to being here on Steemit and I do want to commit, but I think I need to slow down and just go at a pace where I can stay here for a long time.

I feel like posting this is a cop-out and kind of cowardly. I should just power through and stop being whiny about it. But I think being honest about this is also important.

Steemit is such a great platform and I really want to participate but I stress about what to write and what to post that it feels like a re-visitation of my old life with Twitter. It's just a horrible flashback though, because people here are very encouraging and kind. I think I was more traumatized than I think by all the Twitter BS that I went through.

After writing all of that, I feel like I'm making a bigger deal of things than they actually are. So I'm kind of embarrassed to post this, but heck I'm still going to do it. Hope there will be people who can relate to this.

Thanks for reading my little indulgent venting post.