Anxiety

Saturday our Relief Society, the women’s organization at church, held a brunch after a morning at the temple. I arrived a bit later than others and as I walked through the parking lot I felt a low-grade anxiety. What if there were no empty seats at the tables? Would I have to sit alone at an empty table? I assured myself that wouldn’t happen, but when I entered the room, sure enough, three tables were full, with an empty fourth table.

Someone saw me approach and waved me over. “Pull up a chair, we’ll move over.” I felt great relief.

It might surprise people that I suffer any social anxiety. I’ve been an active member of this congregation for 27 years and it feels like home: certainly I should feel relaxed and confident in entering a room for a social event.

But it takes me right back to seventh grade: the first year at Thomas Alva Edison Junior High in Westfield, New Jersey. At my very first lunch hour, I arrived at the cafeteria after my friends and found to my horror that all the tables of seventh graders were full. The cafeteria monitors did not allow more than six to a table. I was assigned a table with five ninth-graders. It’s hard to say who was more put out: me or them, but they expressed their disgust openly. They called me Gertrude (in tones that made it clear that only fat and ugly old ladies and former Nazis possessed that name) and made my lunchtime miserable.

Perhaps a more confident girl would take it in stride and win them over, but I was not that girl. My resolution was to keep my head down, literally, eat as fast as I could, and rush out to the school yard to wait for my friends to finish eating.

How do we get over the hurts of years past? When two more women arrived after me, I quickly got up and helped form the fourth table. Be part of the solution.