Socially awkward

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
1

I transferred sophomore year and couldn’t talk to anyone. “How do u make friends?” I thought. People seemed so comfortable and graceful, like everyone knew everyone and I was on the outside. Any perceived physical flaws about myself became magnified and I became more withdrawn, more awkward. The desire to fit in and the desire to be unique and individual conflicted and left me with sort of a no-mans-land kind of style of dress and hair. The signals being: I’m not of you, I don’t know what I am, I’m fit and artsy but I just don’t know much more than that.

In a bold act of courage I’d get the girl to go out, maybe she was intrigued, but i’d screw it up, by being too afraid to screw up, and the real me was buried so deep, or shoved in her face too abrasively, and through some bizarre mix of cowardice and boldness I scared her away.

This was two decades ago. Today I’m a different person, I know that vulnerability is the key to finding your place in the world, your tribe, your love, your destiny. You have to be what you are, not haughtily or gently, but just consistently, day in day out, and let the world answer. You have to be you, and make your desires known, and be a gentleman in the process, and deal with whatever comes of all that, it’s so hard to do, sounds so cliche. It’s the only way to find your place. You’re going to have to be willing to be that guy, that guy some people don’t like, the fool…if you’re ever going to be that guy who loves and is truly loved.

If u feel socially awkward let me advise you. Don’t let your youth slip away without ever putting yourself out there in the right way.

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Good advice. Get out there and have fun!

I’m neither an Epicurian nor a Yangist but I do think history has given both groups the short shrift. Even as parody, I’d say we could do more to be like them.

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Hey wenren. “Get out there and have fun” is actually the kind of advice that hurt me a lot back then. I didn’t need to be told to have fun. The hard part, the confusing, part is how.

The pressure society puts on young man to “simply have fun” is stultifying. And then they make it sound like it’s this easy thing: go do it, u deserve it, etc

Then u have to figure out how to get your share of fun, and that process, that hamster wheel, is devastating. And there’s the matter of girls who aren’t exactly thinking or caring about how much fun you’re having. And bosses. Running toward fun in this way is so often a process of fleeing yourself. I wish someone guided me better. It was always this same cocksure pressure from older guys. Go get drunk, get pussy, you think too much. Or it became, just be yourself, be cocky, be rich, etc.

I wish I knew then what I know now.

4

The kind of fun pitched to young man is often transactional. The picture is of a guy who has a group of friends, who’s well liked, who gets sex, is respected by peers, has lots of laughs and his life is a series of important adventures, stories, and the finer things. A pub and a game, a great meal with friends, a weekend water skiing, etc and so on. To get a hold on this transactional fun you have to have value, shit doesn’t just come to you. People need to want you around. You need to be cool.

This pursuit of cool becomes a haphazard process of concealing that which deviates from cool, and revealing that which conforms to cool, or engineering something cool. It’s the concealing part that’s so problematic.

You start to hide your “flaws” or downplay them. Living in fear that if your “flaws” are revealed your fun will be taken away.

The problem is that your “flaws” are part of you, and aren’t really “flaws” necessarily.

This might apply to girls, too. This idea that the only way they can get their share is to warp themselves into what guys want.

School teaches math, science, grammar, but they don’t teach how to be yourself, how to have fun without losing yourself. We are left to our own sorry devices.

If anyone out there needs tailored advice to your situation, let me know.

In what ways do parts if you impede fun? What do you feel pressured to conceal? What do you engineer? What’s going on. Are you spending too much time alone? Ruminating? Have you been rejected? Do you feel inadequate? Hopeless? Think of me as the future you. I can help you. Talk to me. Tell me what’s up.

5

I went through the same kind of thing in middle school, not because I switched schools but because I had never really felt like I fit in and I had finally hit the age where it really started to become clear to everyone else, as well. I had always hung out with the “popular” kids, but only a couple of them actually seemed to like me at all, most of them were nice to me until it was inconvenient to do so, or until I let them copy from my homework.

I struggled really hard trying to figure out who I was supposed to be in order to have real friends.

I was lucky, because my freshman year of highschool I met someone who became my friend and kind of showed me the way. We had met the year before in choir when I had defended her from a group-bullying scenario (not that she needed my help), and freshman year we had an art class together - the only two places I felt completely comfortable in my schools (and only then because I was too absorbed in what I was doing in those rooms to worry about anything else). She saw a glimmer of who I was and she didn’t run away screaming or roll her eyes, she actually seemed to think I was fun and interesting to hang out with, and we became best friends very quickly. Once I stopped worrying about everyone else and just started being myself, I found my people. They made highschool bearable, and taught me how to not be ashamed of being myself before I actually had to go out in the world and do it.

Incidentally, Gamer, you were the type of kid my group o’ friends would’ve scooped right up if you’d been a new kid at our school, we were the proud misfits. I’m sorry that you had the experience you did. People like to deny it, but what happens in high school shapes a lot of who you become as a proper adult.

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Gamer,

I may have to take you up on that offer when I actually build the confidence/momentum to try to make friends and have fun socially.

Glad that things are good for you now.

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Blurry, I love the way you write and thanks for opening up. Childhoods are so, what’s the word, seminal. (Especially male ones.)

Don’t be so sure you would have scooped me up. I was sort of a brooding jock in high school. I had a gang of very tight friends, we were the quirky cool guys who went to same middle school. You SHOULD have scooped me up, but I was doing too well socially, and was too stupid at the time, to be friends with you – although it would hurt me later. B/c my social life was an illusion. I knew these guys since childhood and we loved each other like brothers. But I had already become a quirky guy, this latent philosopher/poet/punk/freak/artist/depressive, I just didn’t know it yet. I wasn’t the coolest kid, but I was cool, nominated “best body” I think, I would always get set up with girls who knew me and I didn’t know them, people would literally say, “so-in-so likes you,” and I had built in plans with the same six guys every weekend. I was a baby, a lazy, complacent fool. I listened to whatever music was on the radio. Billy Fucking Joel. Phil Collins. I didn’t discover the Violent Femmes till much later, but I taught myself piano during high school, some blues and classical. Enough to get into trouble.

By the time I got to college…gone were the carefree high school days. seems like all the new people around me (at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL) were cookie cutter people. Nobody got my bizarre humor, everybody had a certain hairstyle, whereas I had literally none. Just towel dry and go. I couldn’t get that cadence down, you know, the way you talk to people you don’t know yet, to let them know you’re one of them. I couldn’t do that back then because I increasingly felt weird, like I didn’t belong at college. So I become this sorta weirdo, lonely, eating skittles and watching porn in my single dorm room, doing lots of cardio to stay thin. This would be the most wasteful time of my life, because it was a time I most needed to connect with someone, and was the most isolated. I worried my hair was receding, I stopped being buff. I was a music major in over my head, I sucked at my instrument, piano, compared to the brilliant pianists. I was the loser, the weird kid, the one who didn’t belong. While others were blossoming in college, I withdrew, became pathetic, paralyzed.

I didn’t really know what I liked. If I knew what I WANTED, and adopted an attitude of ethical fearlessness, I would have been fine.

More reinventions took place in the future, good and bad, all ridiculously varied. The point is, I think, we are never entirely safe. No matter how confident we are, no matter how much we think we know ourselves, we can wake up feeling thwarted, an outcast, trapped in a bubble of our own anxiety.

What I wanted (and still want) are peers who are curious and fearless and good and alive, who appreciate and communicate and experiment and rebel. I would have liked being with the burnouts or artsy smoking kids in high school, but I didn’t have their pain at the time. I figured all this simple banal stuff was coming my way so why bother being edgy? But there’s always a reason to bother.

I’ll try to help my son through all this shit, I hope I can help, but truth is, back then, nobody could tell me anything I didn’t know. Maybe you have to live through it, or maybe it just all seems so simple when married with kids and these things don’t matter anymore. Simpler said than done maybe?

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Well, you hit the nail on the head - nobody could tell you anything that you didn’t already know. Unfortunately there are so many lessons in life that we can only learn first-hand, it doesn’t matter how close we are to the person trying to give us advice on the matter. We just won’t learn anything until we get smacked over the head with it. This is good, though, this is what living is.

As for trying to help your son, let me offer some advice and you can decide what to do with it.

The most important and best thing my mother ever did for me when I was growing up was to trust me. She knew who I was and what I could handle, so she didn’t censor my life. This allowed me the freedom to explore the things I was passionate about and start learning about who I was (and who I wanted to become) at a very young age. I mean, it’s not like I actually figured it out at that point, but I did learn how to be authentic-ly Nicole, and that’s what it comes down to - be yourself, always, and you’ll find the people who love and accept you.

Along with that lesson was the added bonus of discovering life-long passions for music, art, and especially reading. Because I wasn’t censored in content and was free to read as voraciously as I pleased, I was reading Anna Karenina in third grade while my peers were reading Nancy Drew, so another point to the “not censoring your kids is an overall benefit” column.

I agree that everyone will wake up some days feeling trapped in a bubble of our own anxiety, and those days we have to remember that, “…this, too, shall pass.”

9

Being socially awkward is harder on the guys than it is on the girls, because even the shy girls sometimes get some kind of attention.
Shy guys usually don’t get anything (unless maybe they’re extremely talented and create something extraordinary that catches other people’s attention).

10

In my life I’ve played both the shy guy and the cocksure swashbuckler rakish rogue. I can tell you that the shyness is usually fear of misrepresenting yourself. It’s the tongue-tied-ness you get when you know anything you say is going to seem cliched to people who don’t know you and u can’t handle being seen as flat for that painful transition, and you don’t feel like putting on an audition either. It usually signals that you’re around the wrong people.

Even when I became confident I always found the shyest guy in the room and made him my best friend. Shy usual means fear and fear usually means sensitivity/awareness of danger or something terribly wrong, it usually means a deep sense of the absurd, a deep longing, and welled up delicious humanity waiting to bubble up in the safety of a friendship.

when you get them to chill, open up, feel safe, there’s so much there. If I was a girl I’d look for a shy guy. But girls always want that dude who “knows what he wants and how to get it” and is confident and outspoken. As if someone like that could ever get out of his own way long enough to love you completely – just a prejudice, I know, but if someone is gregarious and at ease and charming with everyone equally, how special can you really be?

I’ve always been particularly charming and rakish in the presence of fat girls and ladies over 50, and men. It’s the hot girls like you that make us shy. We don’t want to talk. It’s the same as not wanting to sleep with you right away. We don’t want to cheapen it with talk. We want to hide, out of respect, we want the first word, if it ever comes, to mean something. It’s a silly romantic thing, but shy guys are romantics.

With my wife, the words came immediately. To be yourself around a hot girl – it’s a miracle. Hot girls, if they want to find the me’s, need to practice putting guys at ease. Don’t assume they can conjure their true self and u simply get to sit back and consume it. If you’re worth a lick, you’ll need to coax out his true self, quickly, and look at it.