I didn’t know I had social anxiety until I took a job in sales

I recently watched a movie that was released in the 90’s, called “Crumb”. I had seen it before and remembered it so clearly. It’s a documentary about a legendary cartoonist named Robert Crumb and his eccentric family.

During the late 90’s I sold and managed printing services for publishers. It was my first job in sales and I was nervous before almost every client meeting. The “Crumb” documentary film reminded me of how I managed my anxiety.

I must have been on the social anxiety spectrum but had no idea at the time. One thing that helped me to relax before a sales meeting was writing in a “stream of consciousness” way.

In the movie, Robert Crumb’s brother Charles has a compulsive need to write. It was something I could relate to because whether it was “compulsive” or not, I would often sit in my office, crouched over 3" x 3" sticky notes, writing profusely.

At the time, I didn’t question why I was writing, but kept doing it for about thirty minutes each work day. I put on my “work face” so, to passers by, it looked like I was writing up orders. My sales performance was exceptionally good, but I still didn’t want to look like a “slacker”. If a coworker stopped by wanting to chat, I would just pivot my pen over to one of the papers on my desk.

There was no concern for grammar, punctuation, spelling or sentence structure. I just wrote whatever came to mind. It was a bit like a journal, but one with no boundaries or timelines. In retrospect, I call it “graphoria”. It’s not a word that’s found in any dictionary. However, it seems to capture the way I would allow my pen to write in a “stream of consciousness” fashion, without an “inner editor”.

In health publications, I have often seen journaling suggested by professional therapists as a method of quelling chronic forms of anxiety. My writing habit was similar in the way it served a healing purpose. The tactile scratching of pencil on paper brought a sense of calm release. After I dumped my worries out onto paper, they stopped spinning around in my head.

Buddhists call this type of circular thinking “monkey mind”. One of the reasons for practicing meditation is to put some space between thoughts in order to be less reactionary. Over the course of about six months, I quelled many anxieties about sales and brought greater presence to my role. My office writings were not a panacea, of course, but they made my work days much more enjoyable.