Hi all, first time poster here.

I'm curious if anyone else here suffers from social anxiety while also being an extrovert.

On another forum I recently wrote a pretty long, detailed description of my experience with this, but I'm not sure if it's appropriate on this forum. Please let me know if it is and if so, I'll just copy and paste it.

But here's the short version:

Many of my "friends" in high school were a mixture of hyper-critical people and emotionally distant people. I never felt much intimacy from my friendships in those years, and I was constantly pressured to party and engage in things like drinking that I had no interest in.

As a result of all that, I became something of a loner and only hung out regularly with a small group of two closer friends. Because most social interactions were with very critical and un-supportive (emotionally distant) people, I was always seeking refuge in being alone and came to believe I was an introvert.

In college, I rarely socialized, but I made one friend I still stay in touch with. After meeting her, I realized, as strange as it sounds, that it was possible to be friends with actively supportive people, encouraging people. Yet since my school days I've had social anxiety so I rarely take the initiative to meet new people.

I often feel lonely, and my social and other anxieties make me feel cut off from people. It doesn't help that when I do meet people, there admittedly aren't too many I really "click" with. But still, when I do meet the right people, I feel recharged. Years of being alone have made me feel drained.

So now I wonder if I've actually been an extrovert all along, and that what I thought was introversion is actually just social anxiety derailing my normal extroverted instincts.

Are there any extroverts with social anxiety here? How do you cope with it?

Any advice is appreciated. Thank you!