no. 70: vulnerability hangovers & adult friendships

on vulnerability hangovers, showing up as your authentic self, and engaging more deeply in your friendships.

One of the most common topic requests I get is about navigating adult friendships – making them, maintaining them, and making the most of them. This is such a broad spectrum of topics that I have struggled to know where to start, knowing that a “friendship 101” post would be hopelessly, laughably incomplete.

Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year thinking about how to share the things I’ve learned about friendship into more discrete lessons and takeaways (like ‘how to never say “let me know if there is anything I can do” again’). The result is a series of posts I’ve been slowly chipping away on to get ready to share. Most of them fall somewhere between a personal essay, an semi-academic deep dive, and a community conversation.

In the spirit of vulnerability, we’re shipping this one today. It’s about a specific kind of anxiety that gets in the way of engaging fully in my relationships, and it’s got to go before I overanalyze it any more than I already have.

I’m really excited to dive more into friendship, and I hope you are too. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

I’ve casually shared before that I’ve struggled with various kinds of anxiety in the past, but I'm not sure that I have ever discussed that I had some serious challenges in college, especially with social anxiety. At the time, it was almost debilitating: second guessing everything, panic attacks before social events, and the permanent breakdown of several friendships because at the time I didn’t have the language or the courage to be honest about what I was experiencing.

Thanks to time, maturity, and quite a bit of work with the principles and processes of cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, I feel incredibly lucky that this isn’t something I deal with on a regular basis anymore. Maybe it’s just being in my thirties and having a much more comfortable and stable sense of self: maybe it’s the people and community I choose to surround myself with (and… those I don’t ;) ), aaaaand maybe it’s nearly ten years of exposure therapy posting about my life online, but regardless, most of the time I feel pretty darn good showing up exactly as I am.

But every so often, one specific thing creeps back up: the post-hang anxiety freak out.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

You are out spending time with a group of friends. Everyone is chatting, drinks (alcoholic or otherwise) are flowing, and the conversation is jumping from topic to topic: life updates, major milestones, dramas small and large. Everyone is engaged, laughing, commiserating, offering advice or sharing similar experiences.

The event ends, and on your way home you process the evening:

Did I talk too much? I shouldn’t have told that story about my shitty co-worker. Did I make too big of a deal about my promotion, especially since XX has been so unhappy at work? I hope she didn’t take what I said out of context, I was trying to be supportive but I’m not sure I communicated it well…

And so on and so on, these thoughts compound until you’re sitting in the driveway feeling every raw nerve exposed, wondering if everyone hates you and seriously contemplating never leaving your house again.

The next time you hang out, the recollection of this post-hang anxiety is enough to make you more reserved – you talk less, share less personally. Your contributions, few and far between, are surface level. Your answers to personal questions are topical, skirting around vulnerable topics and deflecting with humor or self-deprecation. While you think this will make you feel better, in reality you leave the outing feeling even more disconnected and discombobulated than the first time around. And so, the spiral begins again.

If this experience doesn’t sound like you, congratulations on not having social anxiety!

If it does, welcome to the club! Today we’re tackling this very specific social experience: what is it, what causes it, and most importantly: what the hell do you do to manage it?