Neither "wanting to be liked" or "wanting to avoid being disliked" rings true to me, at least as applied to my own social anxiety. I want to avoid being thought of at all. The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked. Possibly more so. Every relationship with another person, positive or negative, is another cognitive burden to maintain. I would vastly prefer most of my interactions to just remain at the default/stranger level where I can re-use the same anticipatory model for most people I deal with.
Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.
I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her.
Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.
I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.
The weird thing about "The idea of being liked is just as anxiety-producing as being disliked" is that it is an incorrect prediction of reality: actually being liked would. Thinking about it is really a different thing: it overestimates the stakes involved, it mistakenly invents "ideas of people" to do the liking which do not behave like actual people, and is unable to build any self-esteem by imagining people liking you because these imagined people are under your our control; being liked by your own imagined people doesn't "count" the way being liked by real people would...
The human mind is not really designed to handle under-socialization well, and seems to fill in the empty space with imaginary figures which fail to meet its social needs. Taken outside its natural tribal operating regime, it bugs out in all kinds of strange ways.
> the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing
This is a very familiar feeling to me, and in my experience it actually is a fear of being disliked, or more specifically about not being able to control others' reactions to me. But the fear is so great and unapproachable that the mind cordons it "out of sight" of conscious feeling.
It becomes better to not be thought of than to expose myself to the possibility of others seeing me poorly, especially if I'm not able to defend myself and make the case for my being seen with grace. I suspect that it is over-exposure to human meanness and judgement and under-exposure to kindness and grace which brings about this expectation of others' dispositions towards oneself; this perhaps is the reason for the Christian injunction that humans not judge one another--it guards against this particular failure mode of the social mind.
Tangentially related, I have for some time had a desire to write short stories, but the anxiety around revealing anything that might expose my inner self is probably the biggest reason why I don't.
I was reading a collection of short stories yesterday and came upon Michael Swanwick's "Slow Life". It struck me that it shares more than a few similarities to his "The Very Pulse of the Machine": Woman astronaut on a moon in the outer solar system is placed in lethal danger, encounters alien intelligence that communicates by reading/influencing minds, she isn't sure whether the communication is genuine or hallucinated, eventually the alien intelligence provides a long-shot resolution to save her. Maybe Swanwick just had another story to tell with some of the same beats. It happens. Or maybe it's like bare feet in a Tarantino movie. The point is, the idea of someone examining my own stories and thinking such thoughts about me is extremely distressing. It's not being disliked that I try to avoid. I'm trying to avoid the baseline stress of social interaction.
I recognize the irony of opening up about this in writing. If you have something to say _about me_, please don't.