That fear of human connection

So this one time I was super high on acid and walking down Eldridge avenue in Bellingham Washington toward Squalicum beach with a good friend and we walk past this house that has a little rock wall in front that lifts its yard up a couple feet from the sidewalk. In this rock wall, there’s all these beautiful little plants and flowers poking out of the cracks. They looked really well manicured but also natural like they were meant to be there. I start going on to my buddy about how beautiful it is and how unique, since most gardeners do just the typical flowers and bushes but this was cool and different and I got kind of hyperbolic –“most awesome garden feature I’ve ever seen in my life”– about how great this display of gardening was and how much I appreciated it. But I was in my own little world focused on these tiny plants and all the little details and I look up and see the guy is right there. He’s kneeling down in the dirt working on some plants above the rock wall. He’s just a few feet from me and he’s grinning like he’d heard everything I’d said.
He smiled and said “hi” and I just freaked in terror. I screamed right in his face like he was a cop, like he was going to rat me out for being high. And I turned and ran. I just ran away and never saw him again.
Like that fear that if you express your joy, they will know you did drugs. Don’t show your happiness. They’ll know. Even if you didn’t do drugs, you can’t show true happiness or appreciation, because they’ll think you did drugs, and treat you like you did.
That was my attitude.
I wonder if people really realize that that’s a side-effect of the drug war, that many of us are literally afraid to express joy because it might label us a drug user. (I mean it’s not just the drug war. There’s something much deeper in society that in an odd way for certain people like the younger me, rather looked down on expressions of true joy and appreciation.)
I’ve been thinking about this story a bunch and for some reason my subconscious decided that I needed to write it out and explore it before going on to other things. Like maybe this story symbolizes something deeper in my life, a deeper fear of my current situation, a fear of connecting with other humans over some sort of beauty or appreciation.
I can’t blame it all on the drug war of course. It’s something deeper, a fear of being really seen, even though being seen in this manner is far more beneficial socially and spiritually, but for some reason for some people, it’s more scary than showing your aggressive us-vs-them side even though that can actually be far more harmful.
I was thinking maybe my brain focusing on this story the last couple weeks was about my current fear of putting my website and app and even my books out there for people to see. Self-promotion has never been something I enjoy and I’ve always found social media to be toxic despite that I’ve always believed in it in theory. I do believe we can find a way to do social media in a healthy way on a large scale, but we obviously are a long way from that point so I’ve realized that I just don’t want to be a part of it myself, or more specifically I do want to be a part of social media, but I want it specifically curated in a way that does not protect me from opposing viewpoints, but does filter out most of the hate and manipulations and deliberate distractions. That’s not really realistic though.
But I can hire someone to manage my social media and to act as a filter.
There’s no real point in building this huge data management platform and writing all these books and dumping all this content onto this website if I do nothing to help people find it. But I know if I try to get into social media again myself, my mental health will decline and I will be drawn down mental paths that just don’t benefit me or the people around me. Same reason I avoid mainstream news media and product advertizing and politics.
But I have the money to start hiring these kinds of things out but I hesitate even though I know that putting myself out there would have mostly positive effects.
My life is too comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of progress isn’t that what they say?
What a weird thing to complain about.