A personal story about social anxiety, software, fatherhood, and learning to understand the person behind the mask.
Walking on the Other Side of the Road
My son said something recently that stopped me in my tracks.
He told my wife:
“I feel like I’m walking on the other side of the road from everyone else. We’re all going the same direction, but I can’t reach them.”
The moment she told me, I knew exactly what he meant.
Not because someone had explained it to me.
Not because I had read it in a book.
Because for most of my life, I have felt the same way.
From the outside, my life probably looked fairly normal. I had friends. I played sports. I learned martial arts. I moved country. I built a career as a software developer. I got married. I became a father.
But underneath all of that was a feeling I could never quite shake: that everyone else had received a set of instructions about how people work, and somehow I had missed the lesson.
Conversations often seemed to end differently than I expected. I would say something with good intentions and be surprised when someone heard something else. Friendships faded away without me understanding why. Text messages could sit in my head for hours because one sentence seemed to contain four possible meanings, and my brain would usually choose the worst one.
In recent years, it has become more physical too. Large groups, busy places, crowded rooms. They can make my head feel like it is imploding. My heart races. I become hyper-aware of everything around me. On the outside, I may look fine. Inside, I am often driving fear back just to stay in the room.
For years, I thought this was simply who I was.
Then my son started saying things that sounded uncomfortably familiar.
This is not a story about diagnoses. It is not a neat reveal where everything suddenly makes sense. It is a story about social anxiety, misunderstanding, alcohol, work, fatherhood, and spending a lifetime trying to understand other people.
Only to realise that the person who helped me understand myself most was my seven-year-old son.
The Problem I Could Not Name
I do not remember having major difficulties as a very young child.
If they were there, they were not obvious to me.
The first time I really noticed something was around the age of eight. It was not dramatic. Nobody pulled me aside and told me I was different. I simply began noticing that I often arrived at slightly different conclusions than other people.
Not wildly different.
Just different enough to cause friction.
Someone would say something and I would interpret it one way, while everyone else seemed to understand it another way. I would say something that made perfect sense in my head and be confused by the reaction it received. Sometimes people became upset with me when I genuinely thought I was helping.
At that age, I did not have the language for what was happening. I just knew that social situations often felt harder than they seemed to be for other people.
The problem was not understanding facts. School was never especially difficult in that sense.
The problem was understanding people.
People rarely say exactly what they mean. They imply things. They hint. They expect you to hear the emotional meaning underneath the words. They expect you to know when honesty is welcome and when honesty needs to be wrapped in three layers of diplomacy.
Somehow, many people seemed to understand those rules automatically.
I did not.
Or at least not consistently.
That was the confusing part. I was not getting the same thing wrong every time. The rules seemed to change depending on who I was talking to, where we were, and what mood everyone happened to be in.
For years, I assumed everyone else found this just as confusing and was simply better at hiding it.
It never occurred to me that many people were not consciously thinking about these things at all.
They just seemed to know.
I did not feel broken. I did not feel excluded. I did not even feel particularly unhappy. But I did have the growing sense that I was trying to translate a language everyone else had learned naturally.
That feeling followed me for a long time.
Making Friends Was Not the Hard Part
My teenage years were strange in a way I only understand now.
I did not struggle much to make friends. I got along with different kinds of people. I could move between groups. I had friends from different schools, backgrounds, and interests.
Around that time, I also started Taekwondo, and later kickboxing. Martial arts became one of the best things in my life. It gave me structure, confidence, calmness, and a place where the rules were clearer. You trained. You listened. You improved. You learned control.
The problem came later.
Friendships would slowly disappear.
Not through huge arguments. Not because someone did something terrible. Not even because I stopped caring.
People simply drifted out of my life.
For a long time, I blamed bad luck. Looking back, I can see the pattern more clearly: making friends and maintaining friendships are different skills.
I understood the first one better than the second.
If I saw someone regularly, the relationship felt alive. If we trained together, worked together, went to school together, or met often, I could build a connection. But if someone disappeared from my daily life, the relationship became less active in my mind.
Not because they were unimportant.
Not because I did not like them.
Because they were no longer physically present in my world.
I rarely reached out first. I rarely checked in. I did not instinctively understand that many friendships are maintained through small gestures: a message, a call, remembering something important, showing up without being asked.
Those things sound obvious now.
At the time, they were not.
I thought friendships continued existing in the background until you saw each other again. I did not realise that, for many people, silence feels like distance. Distance feels like disinterest. And disinterest eventually becomes loss.
The hard part is that many of those friendships were not lost because I did not care. They were lost because I did not understand what was required to keep them alive.
By the time I started understanding that, many of those people were already gone.
There is one important exception to this.
Mark.
My best friend.
I have put him through a lot over the years. Not intentionally, and probably not always in ways I fully understood at the time. I know I can be difficult. I know I can create problems without meaning to. I know there were moments where other people might have quietly stepped away.
Mark stayed.
He has been loyal, supportive, and patient in ways I do not take lightly. He is one of the few people in my life who made it through the confusion, the missed signals, the distance, and whatever else came with being close to me.
I would do anything for him.
And when I think about all the friendships I lost without understanding why, Mark matters even more. Because he reminds me that some people do stay. Some people see enough of you to know the mess is not the whole story.
Learning the Rules Nobody Explained
As I got older, I started studying people.
Not consciously at first. I simply observed.
I paid attention to what made conversations flow and what caused tension. I watched which jokes worked and which ones landed badly. I learned that some people appreciate directness, while others hear directness as criticism. I learned that some people say what they mean, while others say something close to what they mean and expect you to find the rest.
Slowly, I built my own collection of social rules.
I learned how to take a joke. That was not always easy. For a long time, I took jokes at my expense literally or personally. I could miss the fact that everyone else was just having fun.
Eventually, I learned to laugh at myself.
Then I learned how to joke back.
I learned when to speak and when to listen. I learned how to tell stories. I learned how to behave in ways that made social situations easier.
From the outside, it probably looked like I had become more confident.
In reality, I had become more experienced.
The difference matters.
Confidence suggests something became natural. Experience means I learned through repetition, sometimes painful repetition.
By adulthood, many people probably would not have noticed anything unusual. I could hold conversations. I could meet new people. I could make people laugh. Eventually, I could even stand in front of a room and speak.
What they could not see was the work happening in the background.
The constant observation.
The replaying of conversations afterwards.
The search for details I had missed.
The effort involved in situations that seemed effortless for everyone else.
I became good at it. Good enough to pass. Good enough that people sometimes assumed I was naturally social.
But I was not following instinct.
I was following a map I had spent years drawing myself.
Even then, the map was never perfect.
One incident with my brother made that painfully clear.
It happened during on an evening out along with friends. His wife (my sister-in-law) was tired and was thinking about going home. I heard that as a practical problem.
She was tired.
She might need to leave.
I could walk her back so that she is not alone.
So I offered to bring her home.
In my head, there was nothing more complicated happening than that. I was not trying to make a point. I was not trying to interfere. I was not implying anything about anyone. I had simply heard a problem and offered the solution that made sense to me.
But my brother heard something else.
To him, the offer seemed to carry a hidden meaning. Something social. Something implied. Something I had not put there.
That was the part that confused me. From my side, there was no subtext. I had communicated intent. He had heard implication. I had tried to help, and somehow the help arrived in a shape I did not recognise.
Before I realised, I was pulled from my seat and thrown to the ground. Confused. I didn’t know what to say or do.
That kind of misunderstanding has happened many times in my life. I say the thing I mean. Other people sometimes hear the thing they think must be underneath it.
That was when I started to understand that this was not just a collection of random misunderstandings.
It was a pattern.
Starting Again in Germany
When I was twenty-one, I moved from Ireland to Germany.
People sometimes imagine a move like that as a carefully planned adventure. Mine was much simpler.
My girlfriend Betty had moved back to Germany a few months earlier. She found an apartment and got settled. Once things were ready, I packed a single box, shipped it across Europe, got on a plane, and followed her.
That was the relocation strategy.
One box and a flight.
Looking back, I do not think either of us understood how difficult the next few years would be.
To this day, Betty and I still have a phrase we use when life gets hard:
“It’s not worse than the year in Stuttgart.”
No matter how stressful things become now, we compare them to that first year in Germany. Somehow, nothing quite measures up.
I arrived with no German, no friends, no support network, and no real plan beyond being with Betty. Every interaction became work. Ordering food. Talking to customers. Understanding paperwork. Explaining myself. Understanding other people.
I had already spent much of my life trying to decode social situations.
Now I had to do it in a language I did not speak.
It felt like someone had turned the difficulty setting up without warning.
Money was tight. The jobs were rough. I worked in bars and as a cashier, which forced me to learn German and interact with people long before I felt ready. Betty carried far more than her share during those years. She was my translator, my support system, and often the person holding everything together while I tried to find my feet.
The stress affected both of us. It even affected her health. There were times when it felt like we were just trying to survive until the next month.
The strange thing is that I never wanted to leave.
Even during the worst parts, I liked Germany. I liked the challenge. I liked the idea of building a life somewhere new. The struggle was not Germany itself. The struggle was building an entirely new life from nothing.
Those years changed me.
Some changes were good. I became more independent, resilient, and adaptable. Other changes were harder. Toxic workplaces, small village drama, disappointments, and repeated misunderstandings slowly made me more guarded.
Not all at once.
Just little pieces at a time.
I became more cautious about who I trusted. Less willing to assume good intentions. Less open than I had been before.
But somewhere in the middle of that difficult period, something unexpected happened.
The passion I once had for repairing computers began to disappear.
And software development appeared in its place.
The Dream Job I Never Knew I Wanted
If you had asked younger me what I wanted to do for a living, software developer would not have made the list.
Not because I disliked computers. Quite the opposite. Back in Ireland, I loved repairing them. I enjoyed taking things apart, figuring out what was broken, and understanding how everything fit together.
There was something satisfying about taking a problem that looked complicated and slowly breaking it down until it made sense.
When I moved to Germany, I assumed that was the path I would continue following.
It was not.
The passion slowly faded. I did not plan for it. I did not know what would replace it.
Then someone gave me a chance in software development.
I had no formal background. No degree. No grand plan.
I took the chance anyway.
Looking back, it was one of the most important decisions of my life.
Software made sense to me in a way many social situations never had. Not because it was easy. Software is rarely easy. But it followed rules.
Complicated rules.
Frustrating rules.
Occasionally infuriating rules.
But rules nonetheless.
If something was broken, there was usually a reason. If you were willing to dig long enough, you could usually find it.
That felt familiar.
It rewarded curiosity. It rewarded attention to detail. It rewarded persistence. It rewarded the ability to sit with a problem long after other people might have walked away.
Many of the traits that had caused friction elsewhere suddenly became useful.
For the first time, spending hours obsessing over a problem was not strange.
It was the job.
I loved it.
Of course, software development did not magically solve the human side of work. I still misunderstood people. People still misunderstood me. Workplace politics still confused me. Unwritten expectations still caused problems.
But now I had something I was genuinely good at.
Something that gave me confidence.
Something that gave me purpose.
For the first time since moving to Germany, it felt like I was not just surviving.
I was building a career.
Becoming a Father While Still Becoming Myself
In 2018, our son Leo was born.
Like many new parents, I felt unprepared. But I also felt like I was trying to build every other part of my life at the same time.
My career was still young. I was earning very little as an apprentice developer. Financially, we were not where I wanted us to be. Professionally, I was not where I wanted to be. Personally, I often felt like I was making things up as I went along.
Then suddenly I was responsible for a tiny human being.
It was terrifying.
Leo had some health issues early on, which added another layer of worry to an already stressful period. Thankfully, we got through it.
Looking back, I do not remember the newborn stage as particularly enjoyable. I remember feeling lost. Unsure. Surprisingly useless.
People talk about the instant connection parents are supposed to feel. For me, the connection came later.
As Leo grew, so did our relationship. He became curious, intelligent, funny, and constantly interested in the world around him. The older he became, the more I enjoyed being his father.
Then the world shut down.
Covid arrived, and like many people I suddenly spent far more time at home. Less travel. Less social interaction. Less contact with other people.
At first, I did not think much of it. In some ways, the isolation felt comfortable. I had always found social situations tiring. I had always needed time alone to recover. Now the world was giving me an excuse to stay inside.
But comfort is not always harmless.
Looking back, I think Covid amplified tendencies that were already there. It became easier not to reach out. Easier not to socialise. Easier to retreat into my own world.
At the same time, another feeling was growing.
Pressure.
I was a husband. A father. A provider. Despite the progress I had made, I constantly felt like I was not doing enough.
Not earning enough.
Not providing enough.
Not succeeding fast enough.
That frustration began showing itself in ways I did not like. I became angrier. More irritable. Less patient. Especially with myself, but not only with myself.
Then I made a decision that probably looked reckless from the outside.
I became a freelancer.
On paper, it made very little sense. I had a young family. The world was in the middle of a pandemic. My career was still relatively young.
But standing still had started to feel more frightening than taking the risk.
In 2021, our second son Ian was born.
Now there were four of us. More responsibility. More pressure. More reasons to succeed.
And freelancing quickly taught me that being good at software was only part of the job.
The Work Around the Work
When I became a freelancer, I thought the hard part would be writing software.
I was wrong.
The software was the easy part.
Finding clients was hard. Building trust was hard. Convincing people to hire me was hard. Everything around the work turned out to matter just as much as the work itself.
Suddenly I needed skills I had spent most of my life avoiding.
Sales.
Marketing.
Networking.
Writing.
Personal branding.
Relationship building.
If you had told younger me that one day I would actively post online, attend conferences, speak to strangers, and try to market myself, I would have laughed.
The idea sounded ridiculous.
But nobody was going to do it for me. I had a family to support. Clients were not going to magically appear.
So I approached it the same way I had approached everything else.
I studied.
I observed.
I experimented.
I failed.
A lot.
I wrote posts nobody read. I sent messages that went nowhere. I attended events where I barely spoke to anyone. I spent countless hours learning things that seemed to come naturally to other people.
Slowly, something changed.
I started realising communication was not a mysterious gift only certain people possessed. Like software development, German, martial arts, and all the social rules I had slowly collected over the years, communication could be learned.
Not perfectly.
Not effortlessly.
But learned.
The biggest surprise was that people responded when I shared things I genuinely cared about: technical lessons, mistakes, experiences from projects, problems I had solved.
I did not need to become someone else.
I did not need to become the loudest person in the room.
I just needed to be useful.
That changed my understanding of networking. For years, I thought it meant being naturally outgoing or impressive. What I eventually discovered was that helping people creates relationships far better than trying to perform confidence.
This did not make social anxiety disappear.
But it gave me another piece of evidence that things which did not come naturally could still be learned.
That lesson had already changed my career.
Soon it would lead me to conferences.
And eventually, to a stage.
Embrace the Chaos
For most of my life, I had been trying to understand people.
Then, unexpectedly, people started becoming one of the best parts of my life.
It began with conferences.
Walking into a venue full of strangers was not exactly my comfort zone. Neither was introducing myself, networking, or trying to find my place in a room where everyone else seemed to know what they were doing.
But something surprising happened.
I loved it.
The conversations were different. People were not making small talk because they felt obligated to. They were talking about things they genuinely cared about. Problems they had spent years thinking about. Technologies they were excited by. Mistakes they had learned from.
The discussions had depth, passion, and purpose.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had found my people.
Not because everyone was like me.
Because I did not feel like I had to translate myself as much.
Curiosity was normal. Technical enthusiasm was normal. Spending thirty minutes discussing a niche problem was normal. Nobody looked at you strangely for caring too much.
If anything, they appreciated it.
Over time, I started meeting people I had admired from afar. People whose talks I had watched. People whose articles I had read. People who had influenced my career without knowing it.
Among them were Ash Davies and Nicole Terc, who inspired me to think differently about what might be possible.
Then there was Ben Kadel.
At the time, speaking at a conference felt completely out of reach. The idea sounded absurd.
Who was I to stand on a stage?
Who would want to listen to me?
I remember asking Ben how he did it. Whether he had any advice.
His answer was simple:
“Embrace the chaos.”
For some reason, those words stayed with me.
Maybe because they applied to far more than public speaking.
Moving countries had been chaos. Learning a language had been chaos. Becoming a father had been chaos. Freelancing had been chaos. Spending a lifetime trying to decode other people had certainly been chaos.
Very little had gone neatly according to plan.
And somehow I had survived all of it.
So eventually, I submitted a talk.
Then another.
Every time, I was convinced it was a terrible idea. Every time I questioned myself. Every time I wondered why I had voluntarily created a situation where I would have to stand in front of hundreds of people.
Then I did it anyway.
People often assume public speakers are fearless.
I am not.
I get nervous when I submit talks. I panic when they are accepted. I stand backstage wondering why I thought any of this was a good idea.
Then I walk on stage.
And for forty minutes, everything makes sense.
There is structure. There is purpose. There is a shared interest connecting everyone in the room. For a brief moment, the uncertainty disappears.
The irony is not lost on me.
For someone who spent much of his life feeling disconnected from people, some of the most meaningful experiences I have ever had involve standing in front of hundreds of them.
Conferences gave me friendships, opportunities, confidence, and something I had not realised I was missing.
Belonging.
But belonging had a cost.
The Cost of Belonging
For a long time, I could not understand why conferences affected me so much.
The conferences themselves were wonderful. The talks were inspiring. The conversations were meaningful. The people were interesting. I would come home motivated, excited, and full of ideas.
Then, a few days later, something would change.
The energy disappeared. The excitement disappeared. I became quieter, more withdrawn, more emotional. Sometimes sad. Sometimes irritable. Sometimes completely exhausted.
For years, I thought there must be something wrong with me.
How could I enjoy something so much and feel so terrible afterwards?
It took me a long time to realise that enjoyment and exhaustion are not opposites.
Something can be wonderful and still take an enormous amount of energy.
Conferences ask a lot of me. More than most people probably realise.
While someone else is listening to one conversation, my brain is often trying to listen to five. While other people seem able to filter out background noise, I struggle to switch it off. I hear conversations happening around me. I notice details. I process interactions. I analyse situations.
I am constantly taking in information.
In large groups or busy places, that can turn physical before I have time to reason with it. My heart starts racing. My head feels overloaded. I become alert to everything: voices, movement, exits, tone, facial expressions, conversations happening around me.
New people can trigger the same thing in a different way. I may look calm enough from the outside, but inside I am sweating through the fear, trying to keep the conversation moving while another part of me is working just as hard to stay present.
For a few days, I can do it. Sometimes I can do it very well.
Then the bill arrives.
And the bill is exhaustion.
Alcohol complicated this.
Part of it was cultural. Back in Ireland, drinking was normal. In my early twenties I spent time with people older than me who could drink far more than I could, and over time I tried to keep up.
But what took me years to understand was why alcohol felt so useful in social situations.
It was not only the alcohol.
It was what alcohol did.
The noise became quieter. The constant processing slowed down. The need to analyse every interaction softened. For a while, everything felt easier.
Socialising felt easier.
Relaxing felt easier.
Being around people felt easier.
That made alcohol tempting, because for a few hours it solved real problems.
I have proved to myself multiple times that I can stop drinking. Dependence was not the issue. The issue was that alcohol worked. It gave relief from things I had been fighting for most of my life.
But borrowed relief has to be paid back.
Over the years, I noticed a pattern. Not during the hangover. After it.
Several days after a period of heavy drinking, especially after conferences, I would experience what I started calling the booze blues.
The sadness could be intense. The thoughts could become dark. My mood would drop dramatically. Sometimes it felt physical, like someone had turned all the colour down in the world.
Understanding the pattern helped.
Once I recognised it, it became less frightening. I stopped interpreting every thought during those periods as truth. I learned that if I waited long enough, it would pass.
That knowledge made a huge difference.
The challenge was the timing.
Conference exhaustion. Social recovery. Alcohol recovery. Travel. Reduced sleep. Then returning home to family life, responsibilities, and two children who did not care that I had emptied every social battery I had.
The version of me that came home was not always the version of me that left.
Unfortunately, the people closest to me often experienced the consequences.
That is something I still struggle with.
Not because I do not love my family.
Because sometimes the people we love most receive whatever energy is left after the rest of the world has taken its share.
Understanding that has been hard.
Changing it is harder.
And in many ways, that struggle led me back to the person who started this story.
My son.
Seeing Myself in Leo
For a long time, I thought this story was about me.
Then Leo started growing up.
As he got older, I began noticing things that felt uncomfortably familiar. Not the obvious similarities. Not shared hobbies or personality traits.
The struggles.
The frustration.
The misunderstandings.
The anger.
The feeling that other people are operating with rules you cannot quite reach.
Then he told my wife:
“I feel like I’m walking on the other side of the road from everyone else. We’re all going the same direction, but I can’t reach them.”
The moment she told me, I understood.
Watching Leo has forced me to look back at my own life differently. Things I had accepted as normal became harder to ignore when I saw them happening to someone I love.
The confusion when people misunderstand your intentions.
The frustration of trying to explain yourself and somehow making things worse.
The anger that appears when the frustration becomes too much.
The exhaustion of constantly trying to understand a world that seems obvious to everyone else.
Perhaps the hardest part is that we clash.
A lot.
Leo is intelligent, curious, reflective, and strong-willed. He wants to understand everything. In many ways, he reminds me of myself.
Unfortunately, that means we sometimes trigger each other too.
When he becomes frustrated, I become frustrated. When he becomes overwhelmed, I become overwhelmed. Sometimes it feels like we are fighting the same battle from opposite sides.
The part I struggle with most is knowing that I should understand.
I should know what he is feeling. I should know how to help.
Yet sometimes I react instead.
I raise my voice when I should listen. I become angry when I should be patient. Afterwards, I sit there wondering why I could not do better when I know exactly how it feels to be him.
Parenting has a way of exposing parts of yourself you thought you understood.
When I look at Leo, I do not only see my son. Sometimes I see a younger version of myself. The version that did not understand why things felt harder. The version that was trying to fit in. The version that was constantly trying to understand everyone else while struggling to understand himself.
That is painful.
But it also gives me something I did not have at his age.
Awareness.
I may not be able to prevent him from facing the same challenges. I may not always react the way I wish I would. I may still get things wrong.
But maybe I can help him understand himself earlier than I did.
Maybe that matters.
Still Learning
If you have read this far hoping for a neat conclusion, I do not have one.
I do not have a diagnosis to reveal. I do not have a life-changing answer. I do not have a list of five steps that made everything easy.
What I have is a growing understanding of myself.
An understanding that arrived much later than I would have liked.
Even now, there are things I still struggle with. Text messages are a perfect example.
Without tone, a simple message can become a puzzle. I can read the same sentence four or five different ways. Most of the time, my brain instinctively chooses the negative interpretation. There is even a funny Key & Peele sketch about exactly this kind of text-message confusion:
Years of misunderstandings have trained me to look for problems that often are not there.
There have been countless times where I have shown a message to Betty and asked:
“What do you think they mean by this?”
Her interpretation is often completely different from mine.
Usually more positive too.
Betty has carried a lot of this with me too.
Not just during the hard years in Germany, but in the everyday moments most people never see. The messages I overthink. The situations I misread. The times I need someone to tell me that what I heard is not necessarily what was meant.
She has stayed through all of it. Through the confusion, the anxiety, the misunderstandings, and the parts of me that even I did not fully understand for a long time.
Mark stayed as my best friend. Betty stayed as my partner, my anchor, and the person who has helped me make sense of myself more times than I can count.
So I am learning to pause. To ask. To not trust every assumption my brain makes.
I am also learning that social anxiety is not always visible. It does not always look like someone hiding in the corner. Sometimes it looks like a person who can speak on stage, build a career, make people laugh, and still spend years quietly analysing every interaction afterwards.
It can look functional.
It can even look confident.
But inside, it can feel like translation work that never quite ends.
That is probably the biggest lesson I have taken from all of this.
Not that I need to become someone else.
Not that I need to fix everything.
Not that there is something wrong with me.
Simply that understanding yourself is a lifelong process.
The older I get, the less interested I become in labels and the more interested I become in understanding.
Understanding myself.
Understanding other people.
Understanding my son.
Most of all, understanding that many of the struggles I carried for years were not signs of failure.
They were signs that I needed better tools, better language, and more compassion for the parts of myself I had spent too long fighting.
My son once said he feels like he is walking on the other side of the road from everyone else.
Maybe he is right.
Maybe I am too.
But these days, I do not think the goal is to cross the road and become everyone else.
I think the goal is to build bridges.
Bridges to other people.
Bridges to ourselves.
And hopefully, for Leo, bridges that take a little less time to build than they did for me.