Internal Judgments

When I was younger my mom always accused me of talking too much. She once labelled me the "why" girl. I would spend hours having conversations with people who were much older than me repeatedly asking them "why" until I was satisfied or they were ready to give me a warm slap across my face, hoping it'd shut me up.

One Sunday morning, 13/14-year old me was sitting at the laptop, that would soon project the church service, with the pastor. My heart was a little bit heavy from more than six weeks of playing counselor to my friend. I needed some advice, or at least a break.

For anonymity purposes, I am going to call my friend Anna. Anna's physical features can honestly go into the dictionary next to the word BEAUTIFUL. I mean, she had it all, an hour-glass figure, big doe eyes, hair to die for and lady etiquette even I still cannot acquire. Her true personality was reserved only for those she was close to, the rest of the school labelled her "popular, mean but probably approachable."

Anyway, on that Sunday morning I sat down with the pastor and in an attempt to unburden myself, my brain managed to come up with the following question; "Pastor, do you think that some people are afraid to be in front of people because they know how harshly they judge others when they are on the spectator end?" I wanted to discuss my dilemma with the pastor without telling him exactly what was going on. Unfortunately he did not receive or respond to my question the way I wanted him to. I kept it moving. 6 years later, that question came back to me related to a different friend, with similar, if not 98% the same, characteristics as Anna.

My two cents (sense) on some of the causes of social anxiety emanate from a person's internal thoughts about other people. We all do it, when people walk past us, we look at them with critical eyes and either rip them apart with judgment or admire them. What manifests physically after our eyes have performed the subconscious assessment is usually modified in a silent stare of admiration or a watered-down negative and almost 'funny comment.'

My survey might be unreliable because I've only really observed this in two people. They literally make themselves the biggest victims of society's comments. Whether it is a comment on something as simple as a strand of hair that is out of place or something as big being called fat. I used to watch these two people get so consumed in trying to change one thing about themselves because of one useless comment they took too personal. With my non-existent counselling skills, I would spend up to three hours listening to them go on and on about how they need to go to gym or change their hair products to ensure that all the strands of hair stay glued down to their head the whole day. This is until I started paying careful attention to the kind of comments they would make about other people. They would tell me these comments unable to catch their breath, from laughter, but none of them would be funny, only mean. I realized that both of them were just as mean, if not more, than the people who they claimed to have said unkind words to them.

The one friend over time developed a serious case of social anxiety. The other, everything she did on social media was never simple and easy, all her pictures we self-criticized down to "My one toe is not aligned with the others so I can't post that picture."

My thoughts might seem a little messy but let me put them together in this final paragraph.

I'm not saying that social anxiety or evasion is solely caused by how harshly a person judges others in their mind, but it plays somewhat of a role in creating it. We all need to be a little bit careful about the things we say about others in our mind, for it can have severe detrimental effects on our own ability to be a part of society and participate freely in social activities. All that will be going through our minds is "Are they judging me now? Should I change this?" As the saying goes: "Do unto others as you would like to be done to you", so I also say "The way you internally judge others has a direct impact on your ability to put yourself in the spotlight, so judge carefully or not at all" - (Ntombi, 2014)