I think it’s important to explore how closely your account is tied to your identity and sense of self-worth.

In some respects, you’re the one they call crazy in a world that has gone mad - if everyone treated their interactions on social media as they do interactions in their community then everyone would be much more concerned about negative feedback, not being liked or appreciated, and not having their contributions welcomed.

That sounds like a bad thing, right?

But what if I told you that the way westerners approach social media, especially pseudo-anonymous social media, is generally a product of toxic liberal hyper-individualism. What if the degree of concern you experience, if it was universalised across social media, would make for a much more harmonious and supportive environment because everyone would be much more concerned with things like social integration and avoiding causing offence or losing face?

Unfortunately, being conscious of these things is a bit of a game theory (ick! Sorry for bringing this up) situation at the moment; because of the way that social media is structured, it heavily favours the worst sorts of behaviours and social interactions and it puts the people who have your approach at a major disadvantage.

Because of this situation, the adaptive strategy of not giving a fuck is the most well-adjusted but only in a relative sense. It’s a well-adjusted to these specific conditions but it isn’t inherently well-adjusted and I’d argue that to a large extent it isn’t truly well-adjusted at all.

Imagine if you were in a room of people who all experienced no fear of public speaking because they had zero concern for how their community perceived them and they acted like it. Of course you’d feel like an outsider to that group but would you be problematising or pathologising your experience of anxiety related to public speaking? Or would you think “This room is filled with a bunch of ruthless assholes and even though I wish I could do public speaking without experiencing stage fright, if that’s the price I have to pay to not be like them then I’m okay with that”?

Because that’s kinda the situation you’re dealing with - we are engaged in a form of public speaking, in a broader sense.

I know that “terminally online” is a bit of a clichéd punchline by this point but if you’ve ever encountered people who really do spend a lot of time on social media and who are really heavily invested in it personally, they are almost always really odd specimens. And this is coming from an autistic person lol. This type of person doesn’t seem to demonstrate an understanding of how to relate to people and how to do irl social interactions. (Note that there’s a distinction between people who spend a lot of time on social media and the terminally online type. Think about the distinction between a philosophy undergraduate who necessarily spends a lot of their time debating in a broad sense vs the classic debatebro for comparison; similar in some respects but entirely different in a qualitative way.)

Idk, I just don’t think that you are necessarily maladjusted. Out of step with the people who are on the stronger end of the online spectrum, sure, but that doesn’t seem like a personal failing to me.

If it’s really prohibiting you from engaging more with the community here or from experiencing enjoyment from posting/commenting then I think that all of the basic strategies around social anxiety apply pretty well to that. You can find tons of advice for how to work with this - it’s basically ubiquitous.

To answer your question more directly though, I definitely feel a fair bit of anxiety with posting and commenting. It’s not uncommon for me to draft half a comment to then delete it before it would get posted. I am hyperspecific with my phrasing and choice of words because I really don’t enjoy those combative sort of negative responses and it’s a learned behaviour for me in all aspects of my life, so if you looked at how much impact my anxiety around social media has on me as a person it’s actually quite significant.

I guess I just have a lot of things to say and with regards to things like mental health, history, and autism & ADHD I feel as though I can make contributions that are valuable to the community on those topics.