On Shame and Surviving Anxiety-Inducing Experiences

30 Mar, 2026

Having to apply for a job again because it's relevant to me and just going through the whole anxiety cycle about it. I feel stressed already with the flea situation in the house and the fact that we're gaining a fourth cat, so I don't really want to go through this, especially because I want to be a scopist more than I want to be a manga editor anyway — but I know I shouldn't just run away because I need to survive the anxiety if I'm ever to diminish its effects.

I've been thinking a bit about how I've placed too many meanings on this activity that I've feared my whole life. I've created a specter out of it by overlapping all my fears and insecurities (and to some degree, some variety of hope) on the idea of a job interview, and I need to disentangle it and take it piece by piece. So much of it seems undoable to me, still, but maybe I can increase the tolerance even a little bit. Since even if I ultimately don't end up needing this skill, the act of surviving your fear and building resilience can't be for nothing.

The main thing I've been thinking about and noticing is that it's less of a question of whether I'm harming the interviewer by interviewing terribly and more of a question of whether I think I can tolerate the fallout. And there's something deep in my body screaming at me that I can't tolerate the fallout, and that if I do badly I might as well die, kill myself, etc., that I have to just sit with and examine. I've already asked my (past) therapist about the interviewer's experience of the process of interviewing, and I think my idea of how memorable of an interview I'd be is a mixture of both a (negative) sense of self-importance and the fears of being observed, panopticon-style, which is inherited from school.

Something I've been contending with lately is that shame itself is a preoccupation with the self. It's fundamentally self-centric and self-absorbed. The hard part with that truth is holding the fact that it's self-absorbed and that all the suffering experienced under shame is still real and that the experience of shame itself has actually 0 moral weight. There are people who experience shame and do terrible things and people who don't, and the blanket term of this experience doesn't tell you which or in what circumstances someone might do what. It's hard to hold all this nuance without the defensive part of me going, "Oh, now you're going to sound just like all those people that say suicide is fundamentally selfish, which is a reductive and victim-blaming statement," which is itself a not fully nuanced thought.

The further nuance is that shame is also socially taught, so while the experience of it is individual and self-absorbed, there are repercussions that exist out there, somewhere. But the way that they're internalized is individual — much like any other experience of a concept in human society. It's this jumble of meanings, both imposed and self-created, that lead to an overdetermined set of emotions when confronted with a specific trigger. Perhaps it's important to take things piece by piece and ask yourself where you got a notion from, what you fear will happen and why, what the actual likelihood of said thing happening is, and lastly, if you can tolerate it. Therapy-wise, these terms probably already exist out there as something like "trauma," "reality-testing," and "stimulus-fading," and it's these things that people learn through conversations about their trauma and proposed steps of action.

I've had to hold the fact that shame causes me active and real suffering and the fact that experiencing shame is not a "get out of responsibility free" card, and to try to hold these pieces with enough distance so that they don't just switch off in an endless cycle by triggering each other. It's pretty hard to articulate because, when you're first thinking of shame as something you deeply experience (as I was something like 6+ years ago), the foremost thing that takes up all your brain space is the overwhelming experience of the feeling. It feels like an open wound that you need to tend to, so trying to sit with the full nuance of anything feels like someone's asking you to pour salt onto it rather than heal it. But ironically enough, healing requires gaining a distance from that "I'm bleeding out" mentality, and not in a "I pretend I do not feel like I'm bleeding out" way. It's honestly baffling. As baffling as being told that the only way to make anxiety better is to not give in to what it wants, to tolerate discomfort. It feels like being told to hold your hand directly over a fire, or to edge closer to putting your hand in the fire. And yet, because it's not a real fire, that's exactly what it requires.

The most maddening part of it all, of course, is that it has to come from your own will and consent, or else you do feel like someone has stuck your hand in a fire, or whatever metaphor we want to use here. The willingness to try in the face of uncertainty that has to come from the self. Honestly speaking, I still don't think I have that much of it. I'm pretty sure, even now, that I will never fully "heal" from shame or anxiety, and I think that's also just living with the reality of society being hostile. But even so, I have to think about the ways in which I can hold the line or edge it out even 0.01 mm further if I want to build any sort of emotional resilience and not just feel like I'm constantly under siege. It's also required if I want to become a person that is more capable of engaging in compassionate work.

I know all of this. Part of me hates it, and the other part thinks it's so smart for being able to understand this now outside of a simple coin flip of "The world wants me dead," and "Actually, the world is functioning enough, I'm the one who wants me dead." Cue the next part: Why don't normal people ever have to contend with this??????????? and whatever thoughts come next about trying to complicate that and putting in questions of privilege and fault and all of that. Whatever, back to the point.

Can I tolerate the experience of interviewing badly? It feels like a no, but the reality is probably a yes, in the same way that I survived failing the driving exam the first time. But despite knowing that I'll survive, I think what I'm actually afraid of is being hurt in a way that is unforgettable to me and that will continue to haunt me and become its own new source of special shame. And there's also the question of what surviving looks like — I passed the driver's exam but I still don't drive because I couldn't tolerate the everyday anxiety of being on the road. But here's where the reality-checking comes in:

1. Most likely, if I ever interview, it'll just be me not saying things and fumbling for words for an entire hour. This will, indeed, be excruciating. However, if the interviewer is still getting paid for their job of watching me scramble like a fish out of water for an hour, they are at least still getting something out of this no matter how annoyed they are. Secondly, if the interviewer has been doing this job for a while, they probably have seen other fish out of water and are unlikely to remember this particular fish. Lastly, 5 years from the interview date, they will have experienced many more other important things in their life and almost certainly DGAF.
   
   
2. If I bomb out, definitely do something so terrible that the interviewer has no choice to remember me because I tripped them and they got a concussion or something like that, I will definitely want to kill myself, but I cannot kill myself, so the real answer here is that I can set up a self-EMDR schedule about it and exorcise the ghosts that way. Or find another therapist who can do that for me.
   
   
3. I don't actually want this job that much. Like, I think it's more useful for society and for me if I became a scopist and helped out with preparing legal documents rather than the gacha roulette of popular manga, many of which are bound to be forgettable slop no one cares about 10 years from now. I think I have more to learn about society from whatever legal slop exists than I do comics, particularly because I already engage in the latter on a daily basis. As a "What would I rather learn and develop as a skill," I definitely would rather pick the skill I do not already have.
   
   
4. I've figured out my health insurance and stuff like that for the next year or two, so I don't actually have anything to lose even if the interviewer thinks I'm the worst person on earth and I am still Jobless.
   
   
5. 90% chance I get ghosted, anyway.

I need to keep my head about the actual stakes of this and engage proactively with the real possibility of massive failure. I'm going to try to just live through this experience as an anxiety tolerance thing and also not try so hard for this application. I don't have it in me right now to fully commit to the full exposure course of "actually getting trained to do interviews" or whatnot, but I can commit to "send in a resume and a few paragraphs and get completely ghosted." I just have to remember that living through this anxiety isn't for nothing. If I can get myself to believe that, I can actually build resilience rather than the previous mode of operation, which was either hide and beat myself up, assume I got lucky, or just tell myself I was an idiot for ever being worried about something so easy.

They say that there are stories of the self that everyone carries with them. How they describe where they've gotten in life, what they're doing, who they are. I think to build emotional resilience, you have to piece together a narrative that is neither self-defeating nor self-aggrandizing, with appropriate room for failure. So much of this is trial and error. But I've already error'd in a very particular way my whole life, so it's time to try a different approach.