When you finally screw up the courage to reach out to someone about RPing with them, and they’re like “Sure that’d be awesome” and you set it up for the next day because just reaching out took so much of your mental fortitude and you need to recharge before you actually do the RP. And then the next day comes and you page them and get no response. And your anxiety and insecurity just immediately kicks in full force and convinces you that nobody gives a shit about you or your character or wants you around. And so after waiting a few hours with no response despite the person talking actively on a shared channel, you quietly log out and don’t log back in for over a year.
It’s been a year, you’re not logging in to play, mostly just to say Merry Christmas to someone. You start reading through all the bulletin board posts that you’ve missed.
You read a post by someone dated like a month after you last logged in mentioning that they struggle with anxiety so if they seem like they’re uninterested or they aren’t reaching out it’s not because they don’t want to RP, and then that one person who never responded to you has replied to the post like ‘Same >_<’. And you get a sinking feeling in your stomach. And you keep going through the BB posts and that person who never responded has made a post 2 months later explaining they’re going on hiatus and dropping their characters because their anxiety has made it almost impossible for them get RP and play.
And you sit there feeling bad because maybe if you’d had the confidence to at least just page them a second time to make sure they hadn’t just missed the first one then maybe they’d have had someone else to RP with and not felt so isolated.
And then you feel even worse because you realize that even with the knowledge that other people are going through the exact same struggle and all you need to do is reach out, nothing will change because your anxiety doesn’t care about logic and it’s always just going to assume the worst and you’re never gonna get to enjoy this hobby that always gets you so excited when making a character because your brain is a jerk that hates you.
That’s like, I dunno, a peeve or something I guess.