Interesting post. I do occasionally watch myself interacting with people, smiling at the right times, joking at the right times, getting people to laugh and feel comfortable...and it absolutely amazes me that I can do this. Even with grownups! (Actually, older adults and young children are much easier to interact with than people in my age group, probably because I’m not expected to compete with them for status...that game still throws me off.) Yeah, socializing is fun, and it’s awesome that I can now find it fun. It took years of spending a lot of my time among extroverts and feeling really, really out of place there...but now I’m glad that I didn’t immediately segregate into a group with “people like me”, because I probably wouldn’t have learned better social skills from them.
Interesting post. I do occasionally watch myself interacting with people, smiling at the right times, joking at the right times, getting people to laugh and feel comfortable...and it absolutely amazes me that I can do this. Even with grownups! (Actually, older adults and young children are much easier to interact with than people in my age group, probably because I’m not expected to compete with them for status...that game still throws me off.) Yeah, socializing is fun, and it’s awesome that I can now find it fun. It took years of spending a lot of my time among extroverts and feeling really, really out of place there...but now I’m glad that I didn’t immediately segregate into a group with “people like me”, because I probably wouldn’t have learned better social skills from them.