Social Anxiety
I’m slated to go to a friend’s wedding this weekend, as well as his bachelor party later tonight, and I must admit I find both prospects mildly (or not-so-mildly) terrifying. Besides the fact that I’m generally uncomfortable in situations where I’m expected to socialize with large numbers of people I don’t really know, I think I may have found a potential explanation as to why these things bother me so.
While my friends from college may vehemently disagree, I’m typically a pretty shy and reserved fellow, especially around new people, mostly because I’m afraid of terrifying these poor new people with my eccentricities. (Don’t laugh, it happens all too often) Beyond that, I usually feel some inexplicable obligation to carry on a conversation. Personally, I’m quite content with keeping silent, since I almost never have a vested interest in whether the conversation continues, however, there is some itching need to be “polite” that compels me to speak, even when I have nothing of import to say. Which leads to the second major cause of my social ineptitude (or so I suspect), and requires a flashback to my college days:
During my Junior year, there was an underclassman who had an uncanny ability to talk. Unfortunately “Nick” didn’t really have much gift for making his conversations interesting. He would come into a room, or join in on the edges of a conversation, and just start talking. And he wouldn’t stop. He’d just keep talking about whatever it was the conversation started on, and managed to rapidly follow tangent after tangent into topics diametrically opposed to the original. There was one instance where he caught me in the wee hours of the morning (when I was struggling to finish some physics homework or another), and just settled down at my desk to talk. Not wanting to seem rude, I glanced briefly at my watch, and tried to pay attention. Nearly 30 minutes later, I nodded myself out of sleep, to find “Nick” still happily chatting away, apparently oblivious to my gaffe. This happened twice more over the ensuing twenty minutes, before I fell asleep for a much longer period, waking over an hour later, finally finding “Nick” had vacated the premises.
So what does this little anecdote have to do with my fear of conversations? Simply put, I don’t want to put anyone through what “Nick” put me through. While I’m reasonably certain I’d notice if someone fell asleep while I was talking, and I think I’d notice if they were simply bored, I know for a fact that I tend to ramble on about topics that no one in their right mind would find interesting. (Except for folks like you, but then y’all aren’t in your right minds, are you?)
So I will swallow my trepidation and attend these social events where I will know a grand total of 7 people, and struggle mightily to resist the urge to babble on about computers, programming, intellectual property, or role-playing.
April 29th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
In a past life, I would say that I shared your discomfort with crowds but I had to overcome it as a matter of course for various reasons that I may go into at another time. Presently, just remember that any opportunity to interact with people is an opportunity to learn. This learning may be abstract, objective, or even a chance to learn more about yourself in the reactions we see. Also, at the most basic level, engaging others is a practice in exactly that activity and is functional and purposeful for that reason alone.