Why I chose to write about a guy with Social Anxiety

With the republication of my uplit novel, I’m reposting this article from 2019, which first appeared on donnasbookblog.

My childhood was marred by bullying. It was the urge to do something to stop the bullying that led me to catch social anxiety. I kept quiet as much as I could, because they couldn’t tease me for things I said if I didn’t say them, and this became a habit that I couldn’t discard when I wanted to.

Decades later, after discovering this thing that had “strangled” me for so long had a name, and that I was by no means alone with this problem, I joined an online forum for sufferers of social anxiety. Here, I learned a lot about the others, about what we shared as well as our differences. I realised that most of the others, like me, had mistakenly imagined themselves to be alone with it…