The antidote to my social anxiety I didn’t know I needed.

TL;DR: I never thought my shyness was an absence of “identity” until I started running.

I was painfully shy as a child. With a twitchy eye and bashful smile, I would turn my face away from any stranger who attempted to make contact with me.

Moving to an intimate all-girls independent school certainly helped me express myself a little better as I came into my teenage years, yet I would still shy away from answering any questions in class. Drama, sports, and any other activity that might have me in the limelight were largely avoided at any expense.

As I left school and started going out and about with my friends more, it became apparent that even simple things like ordering food in a restaurant or saying excuse me to a stranger, would clam up my palms and give me a dryness in my throat which threatened tears.

Bulimia made me a runner when I got to Oxford. I wanted to stay skinny, and I had learned from the very best (my mother) that running was a terribly effective way to achieve the skinny ideal.

What I didn’t anticipate, was that the classmates I would usually struggle to communicate with, soon started referring to me as “Jess the runner”. I was becoming known for my morning escapades before college.

I loved that I was becoming known as “a something”. It was that very “something” I had completely lacked up until this point — an identity. A description of self.

I hung onto that description as a way to aid me at parties throughout that very drunk Oxford year. I finally had something to say about myself if asked. Apparently “I’m a runner” or “I run” are socially acceptable descriptors.

I still hang onto that description to aid me through social events to this date. It’s a wonderful conversation point, and you get bonus points if you can describe with vigour to your dinner party comrades somewhere of interest you have run in the last week.

In the instances where the person I was talking to was not a runner, I knew that there would almost certainly be someone else in the classroom, office, or party who DID enjoy running. Because runners are everywhere, and we like to make it known.

You see, what I discovered was that the biggest barrier to my interactions with strangers was the fear that I was boring. Running took that away. Running made me believe that I was not a boring person. I was a capable human with interests, who was actually equipped with words that formed at the mouth to describe said interests.

I’m not saying that running is the cure for social anxiety, or that everyone’s social anxiety will stem from a fear of being boring but perhaps throwing yourself wholeheartedly and unapologetically into your interests might be the very thing that makes it all feel a little bit easier?

It’s worth giving it a go I think.