For more than a decade, I thought I was fearless in social situations. Not just comfortable. Fearless. I would swan into restaurant openings alone, glide past the media wall, smile for photos, then wander into rooms full of strangers and somehow always leave with a handful of new friends, a business card or two, and a story worth retelling.

Movie premieres, beauty lunches, launch parties — I did it all without much thought. I never rehearsed conversation starters or worried about awkward silences, and I never wondered if I belonged in the room. I assumed this was simply my personality.

I was extroverted, confident. A natural social butterfly. What I did not clock at the time was that I would also probably have knocked back three glasses of champagne before the entrée even arrived.

Previous Life The Problem With Finally Meeting A Nice Guy Health & Wellness How Pregnancy Has Affected The Way I Manage My ADHD Next Now, I am thirty-eight with a late ADHD diagnosis and take medication, and I’m also currently in the third trimester of my first pregnancy, so of course, I’m not drinking at all. I drive myself to events, and show up clearer, steadier, and far more aware of my own nervous system. And suddenly, the social courage I once took for granted feels like it has vanished.

In its place is something I am only just learning to name: social anxiety. These days, the lead-up to an event feels less like anticipation and more like dread. I look at my calendar and feel the same low-level unease I get when I remember I have to go to VicRoads.

Events now feel like something necessary but inconvenient, and something I would very much like to cancel. I overthink what I will wear and panic-buy outfits online, then hate everything when it arrives. I change three times before I leave the house, arrive already overstimulated.

Then when I walk into the room, I feel it immediately. The nerves. The noise. The small talk.

The air kisses. The smiling. The scanning for familiar faces. Sometimes I want to shrink myself into a polite corner until it is socially acceptable to leave and other times I want to fully about-face and walk straight back out the door.

This is happening even when I arrive with one of my closest girlfriends, and when I am surrounded by people I know. Even when, logically, I understand that I am safe, invited, and welcome. That is the part that has rattled me.

“Now that I’m sober, I meet myself fully in these rooms.” Because this version of me directly contradicts the identity I have carried for most of my adult life. If you had asked me at twenty-five whether I had social anxiety, I would have laughed. Loudly.

I was always out, booked, and buzzing. I fed off rooms full of people and loved the chaos of it. I thrived in it. But I am starting to suspect that what I thought was confidence was often liquid courage.

Alcohol smoothed the edges. It blurred the room and lowered the volume on my inner monologue. It removed the need to monitor my body language, my tone, my timing, and made me braver, louder, looser.

It gave me a temporary pass out of my own head. Now that I’m sober, I meet myself fully in these rooms. Every thought. Every flutter of nerves.

Every social calculation. Every second of self-awareness. And suddenly I am realising that I might not have “developed” social anxiety at all.

I might have always had it but I was just better at numbing it. There is also something about getting older that sharpens your boundaries. At twenty-five, I desperately wanted to be everywhere but at thirty-eight, I protect my energy like it is currency.

Small talk used to feel charming, but now it drains me; air kisses used to feel glamorous, but now they feel like admin; and loud conversations across tables once felt exciting, and now they feel like sensory overload. I also no longer arrive to events with the same hunger to be seen or prove that I belong in the room, and I am realising how much of my earlier confidence was tethered to the desire for external validation. When that desire fades, you are left with yourself, and sometimes yourself feels anxious.

What confuses me most is the contradiction. I still love my work and being around other people, and I still love the conversation and connection they bring, but I just seem to love it best in quieter doses now. Image: Supplied Long lunches with people I trust.

Dinners where no one needs to perform. Catch-ups where you can exhale. But drop me into a buzzing room full of strangers and blinking cameras, and my nervous system lights up like a Christmas tree.

I have started to notice the physical symptoms. The shallow breathing, tight chest and the sudden urge to escape. The hyper-awareness of where I am standing, who can see me, what I am doing with my hands.

This from a woman who once waltzed solo into packed venues without a second thought. So I’ve been trying to figure out what has changed. Have I become more socially anxious with age, or have I simply reached capacity for