Tag Archives: social anxiety

Ringtones

Because of my social anxiety, phone calls make me nervous. That’s why I like to have specific ringtones for each of my important people and groups, so that I can know at once who is calling. In addition, it’s fun – I like to play with melodies and decide which one to assign to this or that person. And I don’t care that my taste can be outdated or even ridiculous.

For example, my default ringtone is currently “Appelle mon numéro” by Mylene Farmer – because it means “Call my number”, and because I like her songs. For my family… somehow it happened that all their ringtones are Japanese songs. There is one of Naruto ending songs for my nephew – because he is a fan of Naruto. For my child there is also an ending from Anime that she used to like… now she has outgrown it, but the song is so beautiful and sad, and reminds me of her fragility.

The melody for my brother is a funny song “Dango San Kyodai” which means “Three Dumpling Brothers” – see, it’s about brothers! That’s why I chose it. And for his girlfriend it’s Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon”, because she believes in Karma, Ayurvega and all such things – and also the song is positive.

And for my work contacts I used to have the famous SailorMoon opening. Because it’s a heroical song, you know, and one definitely needs some heroic mood when gets a call from work. But now my managers don’t call me by phone, using e-mail or Skype instead. So I gave the SailorMoon ringtone to contacts from animal protection society whom I help, taking cats to keep at my home. They deserve it — no doubt, animal protection is a heroic thing!

My child’s research

Recently my daughter is searching for information about disorders that supposedly could be related to her condition. Social anxiety disorder, autistic spectrum disorders, neuroatypical disorders… She diligently reads information in English, watches videoblogs – also in Englsh, because, according to her, information that could be found in Russian Internet is all outdated or prejudiced. For the same reason it’s hard to find a competent specialist in reality, espedcially in a provincial city like ours.

Based on this information, she tries to analyse her own behaviour, habits, feelings, childhood memories. And she finds many things that look like symptoms of some condition… She explains to me that she never thought something was really so wrong with her. She took it as normal that her time in pre-school was only suffering and she was unable to communicate with other kids. Then at school… I admit it, I also took it as normal, never finding it too disturbing. Partly the reason is that me and her father, we are quite shy and have poor communication skills. So I thought like, it’s normal if a child hates school – so what? everyone hates school. And so on. Lack of information is a bad thing…

Anyway, I’m glad that she is doing this research now. I’m glad to see her interest, and I deeply respect her great thinking work. I can’t imagine what her future will look like, but I’ll do everything possible to support her…