jackofallgeeks | The Perks of Not Being A Wallflower

It just occurred to me, as I'm sitting here with little to do -- my hardware being fritzy, my email being down, and my boss being sick -- that confident people are a lot more... approachable than someone who's shy. That's a bad way of putting it, but I can't really find the words I mean. This not-quite-epiphany (I've known this sort of thing more or less for most of my life) dawned on me when I randomly recalled how my little brother's girlfriend, Kitty, behaved when meeting the family. She's almost visibly frightened. She keeps her head down, her arms close to her body, she doesn't make eye contact, and she talks very softly. And while she has every right to be shy -- my family is amiable enough, but anything times ten is a lot -- she comes off, unintentionally, as very unapproachable.

And in the moment that I thought of this, I thought, "I don't want to be like that." And generally speaking, I'm not. I think it's one of my personal strengths that, generally speaking, I can be casually comfortable in most situations, though especially in one-on-one or small-group interactions (amusingly enough considering the scale of my family, it's amidst large groups of people that I've found I feel the most uncomfortable). there are times, though, when I feel shy, and my 'shy' I mean 'frightened.' In particular when re-meeting people I used to know after a lapse of years, or when interacting with someone who's opinion (1) I care about and (2) I can't predict (this second criterion being why I'm alright with my good friends, because I know how they react).

Ughn, I'm exhausted. the 4th day in a row when 3:00 rolls around and I have nothing at all to do for the last hour of my workday. I just want to go home.