Do you know what Rainbow Quartz (1 and 2) really proves?
Pearl is a fucking show off.
Sardonyx loves an audience. Rainbow Quartz 1 showed off for Greg in front of the camera, ensuring it would be saved forever (and it was). Rainbow Quartz 2 was dramatic and artistic as fuck.
What do they all have in common? Pearl. Look at Garnet and Steven when they fuse. They’re loud and boisterous, but don’t like to show off. Steven and Amethyst fusing are basically one big child (not that I don’t love Smoky – that’s just their personality and it’s fine). Rainbow Quartz 2.0? Fucking announces themself with a dramatic flourish, just like Sardonyx, complete with something blocking their view until they’re ready to reveal themself (Sardonyx has her curtain, RQ 2 uses their umbrella).
Pearl was made and trained to be quiet and basically part of the wall unless called upon to do something for someone else. Her fusions let her show off a part of herself that she never gets to display – the part that wants to be the center of attention, twirling and dancing and laughing and making jokes. Uninhibited and free.
Reblog if you believe phone call anxiety is real and it isn’t childish bad behavior.
Trying to prove a point to this job helper.
Phone calls can be harder on your anxiety bc you cant pick up on the other persons behavioral cues as you talk with them
^^^^
After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable level—even academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my life—except for my phone anxiety. It’s literally the one and only thing I’ve never been able to significantly improve.
I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.
I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that “yes, you really need to ring that person right now”.
I have to write scripts.
I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.
I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.
I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.
I’m also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. I’m normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.
Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threats—more specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called “pessimistic bias”). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement
is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a
socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that they’ve left their stove on.)
Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and “talk down the anxiety”. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us “appropriate”.
But non-verbal social cues aren’t available
during phone calls!
There isn’t any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You can’t monitor your audience for approval. They don’t follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a “phone voice”, “customer service voice” or “professional voice”) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden you’re back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because you’re not getting constant feedback.
It’s a Recognised Psychological Thing™.
Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxiety—of which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent trigger—is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated
anxiety disorders in the world.
It’s most definitely real, most definitely not “childish”, and you’re not alone.
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