I just had a happy playdate with 3/4 of the Turn Sharp family. If you read her blog you can tell that she is not an introvert, which made me think of this important coping mechanism.

One of the stresses I have as an introvert is a social anxiety that gets hung up on “Oh I can’t believe I said that! I am such an idiot! I should just go stick my head in a bucket and end my miserable life!” (Introverts are sometimes over-dramatic.) But here’s the thing: Other people don’t tend to notice what idiots we are.

Extroverts don’t notice because extroverts (I believe) are pretty forgiving. Lots of extroverts like people in general so they’re already predisposed to like you. They enter social situations happy to be there and to be socializing. They don’t have all that free-floating anxiety. They don’t fret beforehand about all the ways it might go wrong. So there’s a lot of give in socializing with an extrovert.

Other introverts are so anxious themselves that they’re not going to focus on your screw-ups (they’re too worried about their own). I had a meet-up with a clear introvert a few weeks ago and I could tell that anything I said/did was filtering through their defense system anyway so it seemed like a lot of the pressure was off me.

That’s kind of my point in my last post. It’s not that introversion is all in my head (I know I’m hard-wired that way) but a lot of the way it plays out is all in my head. My internal pep talks before social events are usually about this — that no one likes cold networking; that the extroverts will talk to me if I give them an opening; that the introverts are just as (if not more) tense than I am. It’s telling myself: My feelings are true but my interpretation of the situation may not be true. I will probably always feel a little wrecked after social events but I can stop the anxiety before and after by recognizing my wrecked feelings as feelings — not manifestations of disaster.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is that a lot of this is skill and we can learn skills. I met two guys who both have this incredible ability to remember people’s names and details about their lives. I asked them both how they do it and they both said: HARD WORK. One of them said he actually took a class to learn the techniques. I was a little bummed out because I was hoping they would say, “Oh I was just born this way!” thereby letting me off the hook for not being able to remember anybody’s name ever.

If socializing well is a skill, I can get better at it. It’s like how special ed teachers work with kids who have a learning disability. They don’t try to cure the disability; they try to help students learn how to cope with that disability. Or how people will work with children who have autism to recognize other indicators of emotion since they have trouble recognizing facial expressions and tone. So I think, this may not come easy to me but it can come easier. The more I push myself, the more I can build coping mechanisms and eventually I won’t be as held back by this twitching left eyelid I’ve got going on.

Until then, it’s the chocolate and caffeine. Hey — these things take time.

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