Social Awkwardness

My assumption is that there was a day in middle school where my teacher taught the secret to relationships and how to achieve success in social interaction. Surely it happened, and surely I was sick at home on the couch that day.

Meeting new people does NOT come naturally to me. I count myself lucky that I have a good amount of friends who stuck with me through the initial awkwardness and are now all entertained by my shortcomings.

Back when I was a professional Christian (i.e. "missionary"), I knew I needed to get over some of my social fears. The way I started was by committing myself to go to the grocery store at the same time of the day...on the same day of the week...every week...to get in the same lane...so I could see the same cashier lady. I wanted to become one of her "regulars" that she looked forward to having a short chat with. I don't know if I ever made an impression on her other than "wow, this girl buys a lot of cheese," but I do think she helped me work through some of my fear of small-talk awkwardness. Or at least embrace it as part of my personality. I really need to get back to finding those sorts of people that I can encounter during my week. For right now, that group probably includes the guy at my local Starbucks drive-thru, the breakfast shift girl at my Chick-Fil-A, and the window girl at my favorite food truck in Orlando. Trying to slowly build intentional relationships with strangers is giving me diabetes.

Another way I've tried to challenge myself to meet new people is by taking a class at my favorite local art store. So far, I have only attended this class twice...but I'm killing two birds with one stone there. I get to challenge myself creatively and challenge myself socially. I'm going to murder those two birds.

Sometimes I take colloquial phrases too far.

This is some of the stuff I've done after learning basic Zentangle patterns in class. My new goal in life is to sell an original textile at IKEA. That's right. I see you, Sweden.

I just realized that I'm wearing 23 buttons today (15 on my shirt, 8 on my pants). Twenty. Three. That seems excessive, right? Both my shirt and pants are in the genre of "fashion" where it's as if they created flaps just so they could button them down. Why?! This reminds me...when I was in 5th grade, I wanted SO BADLY to glue a bunch of buttons onto a shirt and write "cute as a button!" on it. Yeah...a shirt like that would at least give people a head's up on social awkwardness heading their way.