Trying to get some input for someone else. Was thinking of upskilling, finding a group, developing a hobby, guided activities. Any ideas?
I didn’t. I’m still awkward. But that hasn’t stopped me from living my life.
Have you tried boosting your confidence with some cocaine?
I stopped being an awkward teen by simply getting older and becoming an awkward adult.
I was as awkward as it gets. I thought I was ugly because I was told that all day every day by around me. Not my family z my family is awesome, but class mates, coworkers, etc. I was always heavily bullied.
I figured it out twice: first time when I started practicing full contact karate. Within two weeks everyone in school knew and the daily bullying just dead stopped in its tracks. I figured then that bullying has a lot to do with perception. If people perceive you as weak, some will pick on you. If you display strength, at least that part will stop.
However, the damage was done, I was socially awkward as hell, no idea how to talk to girls.
I figured it out for a second time when I married the most beautiful woman in existence.
I know, I know, I’m biased, but my wife is holy shit pretty and at our slightly advanced age, still has a bettery body than the average 18 year old. At first glance, anyone would guess she’s 30. Add to that an amazing personality and a serious great and dark sense of humor, we laugh all day everyday about everything.
I would never ever in my life have thought I could get a woman like her and she actually WANTS to be around me. We are together pretty much 24/7 and even 6 years in we’re still all day hand in hand, even when we’re eating. We are nauseatingly close, and we love every second of our lives.
Still got a lot of other shit going on, a lot of stresses in our lives, but us together? We’re golden.
I figured out that everything is perception. Be self confident because you trust yourself. Know yourself and stop being afraid of things that can’t hurt you .
I went from straightedge to trying every drug once (ALMOST every drug!) and at some point something snapped and I just became comfortable and chill about everything, and I only feel awkward now if someone else is being hella awkward. Even then, I usually don’t bring attention to it if they’re well-meaning, but if a person is annoying awkward/malicious/etc I just leave.
I read a book about autism
You get older and stop caring all the time what people think and it starts to get easier.
My first stepping stone was when nobody in my group wanted to ask for napkins when we were out eating. Which is silly, so I stepped up and ask for it because my mouth and fingers are messy. Ok the other thing is we were in a foreign country and our mastery of the language wasn’t great and everyone was shy.
That’s when I realize that random people thinking of me like some kind of weirdo doesn’t matter because it’s almost guaranteed I will never meet them again.
If I need to integrate with a group sooner or later, that’s when I lurk and just sit in with a few people, listen and add in anything
I realize that last part is hard for a lot of people and I really don’t have anything I can offer how to overcome the awkward feeling but I believe you can do it.
It’s very true, though. I think we all deep down want to say the right things or be the star of the show, but sometimes we learn much more just by sitting, observing and waiting to say something that adds to the conversation, instead of just talking about nothing.
We’re social primates. Caring what other people think is hardcoded into us, and it’s not something you can just choose to stop caring about.
As people get older they just get better at tolerating that uncomfortable feeling and accepting that you can’t please everyone. It’s not that people like that don’t care - they do - they just do it anyway. Caring isn’t the issue, but when it starts affecting your behavior it might become one.
That’s not quite true. It is also built into us to not care about certain people. While what you say is true about our in-group, it’s not true about the out-group. So what you can actually do is mentally identify certain people as not belonging to your group, and then you can actually not care about what they think.
Throughout most of human history, the only people you even knew about were those in your tribe and your neighboring tribe. Whether they were friends or enemies, you still very much cared what they thought about you.
The fact that we now have people in our lives we don’t need to care about is a modern luxury that our evolution hasn’t caught up with.
I stand behind everything I said: we care, and when we think we don’t care is when we especially care.
Throughout most of human history, the only people you even knew about were those in your tribe and your neighboring tribe. Whether they were friends or enemies, you still very much cared what they thought about you.
This sounds like some anthropology shower thought I’m not sure I’d hang a theory on.
That’s a very easy way to dismiss an idea without actually engaging with it. Could you explain what specifically you think is wrong with it, or offer a better alternative explanation? Otherwise it just comes across as ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’
It’s really overly simple and makes a lot of assumptions. We only knew people in our immediate area ergo empathy is part of our hardcoded biology. Is there any research backing it up?
Research disagrees with you, humans are very much capable of not caring about certain people. Also, I’m glad you never had to experience what people truly not caring is like.
I’d like to see that research if you wouldn’t mind linking it.
There are a lot of these kind of studies about empathy. I didn’t find any particularly about “what this other person thinks of me” (I don’t know if there is a specific name for this that would be easier to search), but I think the logical leap from “being able to disable empathy for other people” to “not care what those people think about you” is not really disputable. Though of course it might not be quite the same thing, I think when you can disable empathy for someone, you can also pretty easily disable to care about what they think of you.
Well, I think those are two different things. Empathy is about feeling or understanding someone else’s emotions. Being able to dial that down (like a surgeon or soldier does) doesn’t mean you stop caring what people think of you. Psychopaths are a good example - very low empathy, but often highly attuned to social perception because it helps them manipulate others.
Get a job where you deal with the public.
You’ll get paid and you will learn quickly.
This won’t be helpful but having kids helped me to feel much more like a competent person. I was so awkward, eating disordered, anxious, and having this one thing my body was so good at, a normal human function that worked normally for me, went a long way towards healing my relationship with my body; and babies are so cute people stop to admire them, so I had a connection to the outside world I was happy about, AND I had to go back to college so I could make enough money so it kick started my career.
I cannot imagine recommending kids as an answer, obviously that’s ridiculous. But it was the main factor in my feeling more relaxed and less awkward.
Different settings, jobs, locations.
Also, and this will be very unpopular, but beer really helped. Not at work or during the day (thankfully), but alcohol unlocked me socially and improved my confidence as I met more and more people while I traveled. Not that I’m recommending teens do this, and it’s probably illegal for them in the US anyway, but for me it was a fantastic social lubricant.
When I first met my partner, they immediately suspected I was autistic even though I didn’t. Over time I realized they were right, and everything started to make sense.
Autism is a spectrum though. It presents differently in different people. There isnt a ‘one way’ to identify it, and i can understand the parents’ reluctance to find out, even if i disagree with their position.
I was at a party with my parents one day celebrating our national day. I decided right there that I was going to talk to someone and I started up a conversation with an old gentleman which I was able to carry for a good long time. From then on, every time I was at a social event with people I didn’t know, I talked to at least one person.
Then when I was able to drink, I’d stop in at a bar and strike up conversation with random people. Alcohol helped a lot.
Alcohol is the Great Social Lubricant. There a lots of activities that allow for some responsible drinking while having fun with friends or new people, like student associations, sport teams, Renaissance fairs, concerts, house parties, etc. Just get a drink and go talk to people. You’ll probably do some stupid stuff as well, but at least that makes for good stories.
I had an autism diagnosis. I found a friend with even more autism through school. Thats kinda it
I learned how not to be awkward with experience. I paid attention to what people thought was awkward, got a feel for it, generalized, and tried to avoid it. It’s all practice.
This is great. But he hasnt yet recognised that it might be his behavior that is pushing people away.
Work and finding a peer collective outside of what was available at my high school. I had some friends I went to school with, but I took a kitchen job at 16 and was exposed to a much larger group of ages, personalities, and beliefs. Same thing happened when I started going to punk shows regularly and found a coffee shop with a vibe I liked. Being exposed to so many different people helped me realize that what made me feel “awkward” wasn’t totally innate. I will always be a touch reserved, self-conscious, weird, but being in a jock-centric preppie high school, my ultra-conservative evangelical parents, church groups- those spaces amplified my insecurity and feelings of not belonging until it because a self-destructive feedback loop.
It’s not all rainbows and butterflies though. Alcohol came into the picture and while a good social lubricant it’s been a roller coaster. High school can keep you safe by limiting your friend options to people roughly your same age, in the real world you might end up becoming friends with people years older than you. There’s nothing wrong with making older “friends”, but as an inexperienced youth it can be hard to tell which older people recognize youth and a potential lack of boundaries so they step up and guide you positively, and which are people who struggle to recognize that, are reliving their own youth, or are straight up predators. It’s also really on you to figure out what you think is proper. When I was 16 the dude that had the party house was 30, and bought our beer for us. But he also would cut people off, make sure we didn’t over indulge, kicked out those who crossed the line, and kept people safe. I’m sure a lot of people would find a 30yo running a party house for high schoolers questionable, and rightfully so, but at the same time it was a far safer and more accepting environment for a lot of us kids than our own homes.
I also got involved in non-party related causes that were things I felt passionate about, particularly environmentalism. Similar to the party scene in that I ended up around people of all ages, all experiences, but were all present because whatever we were looking to do, we all found shared value in it.
Being around people and finding places where the bits of me I felt awkward about were accepted helped me. It also helped shape me, because when I trusted those people and they confronted me about bad behavior, instead of taking it like a rejection of me as a person I could learn to recognize what was being rejected was truly an inappropriate action.
