I guess I should briefly introduce myself. My name is Jake. I’ve been socially anxious since before I can remember, though it started getting really bad around the time I started middle school, and still worse from there. A couple years ago, I learned about a condition called avoidant personality disorder. It explained so much about not only what I was dealing with, but why, and really helped me to start gradually turning things around. But we’ll talk about anxiety plenty during our meetings. I haven’t told very many people much about who I really am underneath the anxiety, so let’s change that!

      My favorite thing about existence is music, and my favorite genre is metal. If you haven’t listened to much metal, you might not know that there’s a ton of variety for what’s supposedly one genre—everything from beautifully-sung ballads with orchestral accompaniments, to low-tuned guitars and a bunch of different styles of atonal vocals, to fantastically weird avant-garde stuff that’s really only metal because it isn’t anything else. Sometimes you’ll hear all of that in one song. I enjoy playing bass guitar, but that’s secondary to my love for writing music. If someone who doesn't usually listen to heavy music were to ask me for recommendations, I would suggest the albums Hour of the Nightingale by Trees of Eternity, Cold Dark Place by Mastodon, Kala by Mobius, and Damnation by Opeth (these links will open YouTube in a new tab).

      I also love fiction in a variety of forms. My favorite genre is fantasy, especially dark fantasy, and extra-specially stuff that prominently features monsters, magic, and medieval melee weapons. My favorite form of fictional media is definitely video games. It’s kinda hard to explain to someone who doesn’t play games why I love them so much, because I like very different things about different types of games. My brain doesn’t often “take it easy”, so activities that many people find relaxing are often unpleasant for me, ‘cause I can’t stop thinking anxious thoughts in circles. So I really like playing games that make me use my brain on them, instead of on unproductive thoughts.

      In some games, I love exploring awesome areas, looking for secrets, and solving puzzles—things that don’t exactly have one-to-one analogues in reality, and are really cool in interactive virtual worlds. In other games, I like to be challenged strategically, with difficult or competitive gameplay—things that absolutely exist IRL in the form of sports, but I have more coordination in my fingers than my arms and legs, and I’m also deathly afraid of other human beings (working on that!). My favorite games of the first type are the amazingly-atmospheric Legend of Grimrock games by Almost Human; of the second type, the easy-to-learn, hard-to-master Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard; and somewhere in-between, the brilliant Dark Souls (and Bloodborne) games by From Software.

      Introducing yourself is hard, isn’t it? I kinda just listed some things I like, which might not tell you all that much about me. I guess it serves the main purpose of demonstrating that I’m a normal guy who does some normal things, and that I can communicate on some level! Here’s an awkward selfie to round it out: