I don't think it's possible for most of us to have an anxietyless social media experience because I don't think it's possible for most of us to have anxietyless social experiences in general, but I do think the setup of the social media platform itself makes a big difference.

My secret superpower is...my anxiety. Annoying, but true. I'm always worried terrible things are going to happen which means I tend to overprepare for things. It also means if something bad does happen, it's probably not as much of a surprise to me because I was probably already worried that (or something similar) would happen. I mean it is also a problem sometimes when I go into critical anxiety overload, but that doesn't happen as much as it used to. Still always find things to worry about, though. It's not hard--our world is kind of a mess and I think any reasonable person would be worried about that.

I have to try not to worry too much for a while.  Need to lower my stress levels.  Challenging because there are of course many things that are concerning to me for what are quite valid reasons.  But too much worry is conterproductive.  Those things need me to do something, when I'm able to do it, not have me just sit around worrying about them without doing anything.  The extra time worrying won't resolve them.  I just need to convince my brain of that!

I also need to try not to let small things bother me too much as I can sometimes focus too much energy on something minor, such as 'someone is wrong on the internet'.  That's definitely something I need to put into perspective better in general.

"We aren't that different after all"

Like, to some extent this is always true, and it can be important to address in certain contexts, but I do often have a negative reaction to this statement, especially when it is directed at me, because I often take the implication to mean 'I can accept you because of your similarities to me', with the unfortunate implication of 'I can't really accept or sympathize with people on axes where they're different from me'.

Which is. I mean. Literally something I have to do 100% of the time. Also confirms the fear that dominates my life that if the 'I'm normal, I'm so normal' mask ever slips too much that no one would ever accept me at all haha.

There are so many times I think about what it would take for me to have a 'healthy' amount of anxiety, and unfortunately I suspect the answer might be 'the universe operating in a fundamentally different way than reality dictates'. Because my personality is very much dominated by fear, but I suspect it's not at all entirely baseless.

And this is one of those areas where my philosophy diverges from what I see as a prevailing attitude toward mental health. That prevailing attitude being that the solution to having too much of a negative emotion is always to just take an approach of 'fixing' the person having that negative emotion, with the assumption that just because that amount of emotion may be causing harm in some respect, that it's irrational, and that it couldn't possibly be adaptive in some *other* respect.

For me, I see my anxiety as something that I must confront, not to entirely dismiss outright, but to reassess. There's no doubt to me that even if my fear is responding to the realities of the world rather than imagined phantoms (which I think is certainly not always the case), it doesn't necessarily do so in a way that is helpful to me. How I can deal with my fears, whether they be real or imagined, is not always clear to me, but it is in my nature to try to pick at problems no matter how intractable they may seem, and I've found that sometimes that persistence itself is of value.

I think that too often the analysis of fear doesn't take into account the environment, which dictates a lot about the consequences of our behavior. Even how unrealistic or realistic a fear is varies widely from person to person, often with the variation between their environments. For example: is an old person very rich and/or occupies a high position in society? Then maybe they can completely afford to ignore the existence of covid-19 and still likely live after they almost invariably catch it as a result. But if a person of the same age or younger is poor? Then the risk the virus presents to them is considerably more devastating. For example: is a person widely-liked and well connected? Then they can expect a very different reception to their more unconventional ideas than someone with few social connections.

I just think this is an oft-neglected aspect of managing mental health that's responsible for a lot of useless advice that's given. And that advice can be based on a completely accurate assessment of what worked for some person, but be completely unworkable when the person who it's being given to is not operating from the same context as the one the advice is based on.

So I went out for a walk earlier, which was nice, but the other thing was that at one point I did something that moderately activated my fear of heights (went to stand in an area with a view I like but that is also a bit higher up), and after I gently resolved that anticipated issue I noticed that the sense of general anxiety I'd been feeling all day just abruptly disappeared.

Which prompts me to think 'Really?' because if my brain is seriously telling me that it will alleviate my anxiety after I expose myself to a personal phobia, that's messed up! Nevertheless... duly noted.

A lot of the time I experience anxiety as just my brain rejecting reality.  Which, given what reality is like, I feel is not so suprising, but I do remain puzzled at times about *when* it chooses to do this.

Wow, I am capable of...so much anxiety.  I'm better at dealing with that than I used to be, but I'm not sure it will ever entirely go away.  I always try to work on facing my fears a little at a time.  It's hard for me to do, but it does seem to make my anxiety more manageable.  It means I have to do things outside my comfort zone, but not *too far* outside that zone.  Which is a very subjective measure I am always working on calibrating.

Me, minding my own business: ...

My brain: Would you like an anxiety?! Take two, they're free!