Prostitution: This Post Is Not What You Think It's About

I really like to sing.

I'm okay at singing. I'm not fantastic, but I'm not half bad, and I can stay in tune, which is more than many people can say. This is because I have the advantage of having played the piano for a bajillion years and having parents who encouraged me in the practice of remaining in tune and of learning how to have perfect relative pitch. (I don't say perfect pitch because I only know one person who has really perfect pitch, and that is the Angel.)

Often, people are amazed when I show them my parlor trick, which is where they play a note on the piano and without looking I tell them what note it is. It's something I've practiced a (very) few times with my mother, who thought it was kind of fun. I really like showing off.

It sounds terrible when I say it that way, but it's true. I love to show off. I am an obnoxious little show-off and a huge attention whore- but only when I'm comfortable with the people I want attention from. I'll say dumb things in the hope of making people laugh, and I take pictures of myself with my webcam and put them on Facebook, and I post about fun things I do, and I write a blog about myself and my deep personal problems and adventures. I am actually awful.

But then I remember that this stems from my anxiety issues. This is a facet of anxiety that I don't usually talk about to people, because I forget it's there and I just beat myself up for being an attention whore. The thing is, one of the most common symptoms of anxiety, according to webmd.com (articles reviewed as recently as February 2012 by Marina Katz, MD), is "social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, is an anxiety disorder in which a person has an excessive and unreasonable fear of social situations. Anxiety (intense nervousness) and self-consciousness arise from a fear of being closely watched, judged, and criticized by others."

My social phobia stems from a fear that people don't like me. One of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, quoted a poem by Phillip Lopate in her book Bird by Bird, which goes like this:

"We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
 then for the good of the collective."

And this poem describes exactly how my relationships with people work. With the exception of my parents, who I know love me unconditionally, and the Angel, who I also know loves me unconditionally, I constantly worry that people do not like me. This includes all of my friends, from my high school friends back in good old PA to my friends now, like Superwholockmarauder and Double M and Fairy-Tale Princess and even including the Beast and the Beauty and the Prodigy. I am always afraid that people hate me, that I am screwing everything up, that I am a terrible person, that I am going to hell when I die because I am a terrible person- the list goes on and on. And this is even when I am on my happy pills, as I am right now.

I like showing off because I crave approval. I have issues with accepting compliments, but I love getting them because they make me feel warm and fuzzy and loved. I worry that everything I say is going to come back and haunt me and that people hate me and that if I ask them if they still like me they will lie and say yes when they are really thinking, "Wow, what an insufferable little piece of snot."

I am not an attention whore because I like the attention. In fact, the attention is something that worries me even more when I get it. My brain constantly undermines itself: what if they're all lying when they call you cute or when they tell you you did a good job? What if it's all out of pity?

And I can't just stop thinking these things because I worry so much about them that they are a constant part of what is running when my brain is running. Always an undertone, always in the background- do these people still like me? Do they even want me around? Do they wish I would just go home and die so that I won't convenience them anymore?

This pain hurts me, but I can't stop asking for people to acknowledge my existence because I crave approval, not attention. If I could be invisible, but have certain people know when I was present, and those people were all close friends and family who would love me and tell me I was the best thing since sliced bread, that would be pure earthly happiness.

I am an attention whore because I want to be loved.

I am told this is a perfectly normal and human emotion. It doesn't feel normal. It feels wrong, and dirty, and my brain tells me when I do things, "You just want people to like you. You don't actually mean any of this." This happens very often when I am writing blog posts. It is happening right now. My brain is telling me, as I write, "You're such an awful person, Abramson. Nobody cares about this. Who needs you? Who even reads your blog posts anyway? There is literally nobody in the world who cares about your insights on life- you're just a dumb twenty-year-old attention whore with no real experience about anything- you've never written a book or been famous or even held hands with a boy. What a loser." (I find it interesting that my brain refers to me as Abramson when it is being negative, and Sarah when it is not.) And then I say timidly to my brain, "Well, the hit counter on this post goes up by like, seventy or eighty every few months, doesn't that say something about what I'm doing?" My brain's response is, "Most of those people are middle-aged women on Facebook who are only friends with you because they are friends with your mother, and they don't even like you, they think you're obnoxious, and they're also miffed because the Beast hasn't gone on a mission yet and you don't judge him for it, and they think you're soooooo liberal now that you've gone to college and they disapprove of everything you do. And the other people who read it are your friends and they only laugh because they tolerate you because you like the same things they do, not because they actually like you."

And then I curl up into a metaphorical shriveled ball and die of the feeling of being totally inconsequential and worthless.

It's hard to remember that I'm a daughter of God when I feel like I'm worth all of a grain of dust. I just remembered a blog post I made a few months ago about how I'm worth someone genuine. In a romantic relationship, that's still totally true. You don't want to be with somebody who makes you feel like crap. But what if it's you that's making you feel like crap? Because there is nobody who can make me feel more like crap than myself.

Because I am an attention whore, here is a very bad video of me singing Radioactive by Imagine Dragons. I apologize for the craptastic quality of said video. It was filmed with a surprisingly okay webcam (but it's still a webcam) and yeah.

I feel guilty for making the video, but I would feel worse if I didn't, because my brain would just go, "Yeah, that's right. Don't even try, you piece of crud. You're a worthless worm and nobody wants to hear you sing anyway, thanks for sparing the world from this." So I make the video as a response to my brain, and then it says, "Wow, what an attention whore." And now I feel terrible. You know what, just don't even watch the video. Ugh. I mean, I will leave it there, so you can watch it if you want to, but if you would rather be spared a headache, then don't even bother.

(And my brain is going, "You know, by encouraging people not to watch it you're being even more of an attention whore. Nice going, jerk." I'm sorry. About everything. Including my brain, because honestly who wants to hear about it?)