I think I may have avpd, because many symptoms apply to my life. Around people that aren't close friends or very easy to talk to, I become very self-conscious and tend to either shut down and become unable to carry a conversation or become incredibly hyperactive, thus embarrassing myself. Because of this, people have described more than once as one of the most socially awkward people they've ever met.
My self-esteem is also horrible. As a kid I was very hyperactive due to my ADHD and always seemed to make a fool of myself around people (I was made fun of a lot for this. Not cool.), and I think some of my social inhibition is caused by wanting to avoid embarrassing myself more, although I still do sometimes. As a side note, my low self-esteem was most likely caused by a childhood tendency to allow others to walk all over me that has carried into my life today.
When I try new things, I always expect to fail and be made fun of, but that doesn't usually stop me from trying. Also, when I'm criticized or even when somebody jokingly teases me, I become humiliated and usually blush, tear up, or just shut down completely. Actually, I blush whenever I talk to people and it's starting to annoy me.
My embarrassment and fear of either or being ale to hold a conversation or getting all hyper tends to keep me from forming close friendships easily. It takes a very long time for me to feel totally confident in another person. I can never seem to do the things normal people do to have these close, rewarding friendships with people and I'm worried that the people I care about think that I don't like them. I really do like them, I just can't get close with them, no matter how much I want to.
Also, I tend to kind of... fantasize (maybe that isn't the right word) or dream about suddenly becoming best friends with all of the people I want to be close with but can't. For example, I have a friend that I really want to go to prom with next year, and I always think about how he would ask me and how fun of a night it would be, but he has other friends who weren't afraid to get close to him that he'll probably ask first.
I think that if I do have avpd, it could either be caused by these issues in my childhood, or it could be why I let people push me around in the first place.
And I would tell my therapist but... I'm afraid she'll judge me.
So I guess what I want to know is whether I should look into testing/diagnosis for avpd. But my self-esteem also seems to be a huge issue, and I was wondering if anyone else has experienced a similar issue with self-esteem, and if so how they got through it.
Thanks for reading, you guys are the best