The Mental Health forum has lots of threads about social anxiety and you can find out what others have tried and/or are trying. The purpose of these threads is not to advise anyone else about what to take but to relate personal experience and get support. Anxiety is a terrible state--I know it well. I can tell you that the most powerful tool for me has not come in the form of a pill but in learning to refute my own anxious thought patterns. The web is full of free resources for mindfulness-based healing or cognitive behavioral healing of destructive thought patterns. Benzos can be effective but come with a very high price in terms of dependence, lack of efficacy over time and one of the worst withdrawals of any drug.
It sounds like you have tapped into your own internal power when you thought, "fuck this shit" and forced yourself out of your self-imposed prison. That is really all mindfulness is about: using your rational mind to stop hiding in the past, projecting worry into the future and being in the present moment unafraid of your own emotions. Social anxiety is based on a constant stream of talk in your own head that says you are unworthy compared to others, you are different and lacking in comparison to others and that others are judging you in the same way you judge yourself. All of this is false and your rational mind knows that. Your emotional mind is dominating the way things go in your head but this does not have to be. Most of us make the mistake early on of running from those emotions since they seem to be the source of our problems. But ironically it is by accepting the difficult feelings of fear, anger, sadness etc that allows you to be free of getting stuck in any one of those states. So-called negative emotions are as fleeting as happiness if we don't lock them in place with self-judgment and self-defeating thoughts.
I wish you all the best. You've done a very courageous thing by getting that job. Keep building on your courage and learn to treat yourself like your own best friend. And come on over to TDS or Mental Health and start posting. A lot of us have been where you are and are struggling to make permanent, lasting change inside so you will be among people that can relate to your situation.
