Social Anxiety?

First of all, I would like to start this post off by thanking everyone who took the time to acknowledge my "I'm so shy." post. It is now my most popular post! <3 It means a lot to me. 

In fact, that post has been on my mind a lot recently, and I wanted to investigate my lack of confidence and fear of people... Judging by the title, you can probably see where this is going. 
I am not "just shy". I have social anxiety. 

This is not just something that simply sprang to mind or I just made up to explain why I am the way I am. For a few years, I have been forced basically every day of my life just how shy I really am. Obviously, I know many shy people - the majority of which are my friends - but the way they act around people compared to the way I act around people has always seemed different somehow. 
I remember once I was talking with my friend about how scared I had been that day when I had to talk to a stranger and how I completely froze, but my friend didn't really understand. She just said "I'm quite shy too, I guess". 
This was just silly because this particular friend is probably the most friendly person I have ever met. I just said "Compared to me, though? Are you really shy compared to me?".
To which she obviously replied "No". 

I understand that you are not supposed to diagnose yourself with social anxiety, but I show so many symptoms of it and it has been on my mind for a while. Of course, that doesn't mean that everyone who commented on my post saying "same!" also has social anxiety too or whatever - I basically know nothing about you or your lives. That is up for you to find out!

I think that what scares me the most about social anxiety is that it is scary. It just is. Every time someone I am not 100% comfortable with comes my way and starts a conversation, I am filled with this scary uncertainty. I am also scared about how I will be affected by this in the future. However, I am fully aware that my social anxiety is not going to get worse purely because I am aware of it. All it means is that I am more aware of the problem, and that is a good thing, as it means that I will be more accustomed to dealing with my fear. 

If anyone reading this has the same problem (not that I expect many people to), do you have any method for dealing with your fear? I don't really, but I have been doing my research. 

I think my method for now is just going to be acting, as that usually works fine. For some odd reason, I can sing a whole song solo in front of around 50 people yet I have a slightly blurry memory of a speech I did in Year 8 on Anne Frank in which the edges of my vision went fuzzy and I almost fainted. I also remember spying on one of my classmates' review of my speech (we had to review everyone's) and him having written "It was good because she sounded like she was crying"... Luckily, in my next speech, my voice didn't shake so much. It was an interesting interpretation of what was one the scariest moments of my teenage years (so far) though, and it cheered me up a bit. :P

So that's the end of today's blog post. Sorry if it wasn't as action packed as you would have liked, but I kind of felt it was necessary. 

Speak to you soon,
Lucy x