River: Social skills

[mdlbear]

I'm beginning to wonder whether my (now-crumbling) assumption that I lack social skills is simply due to the fact that for most of my life I haven't been social with more than a very limited number of people.

And I think Colleen, who's one of the few people I do interact with socially and is in a position to give me valuable feedback, simply gave up long ago trying to reach me. (added 3/4) In any case, I don't get feedback or calibration from real people in a real social situation: I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, or what cues I'm missing.

I've always been shy, and afraid to interact much with people I don't know. I seem to have lost a lot of that fear in the last year or so, but not all of it, and the habits are still there.

My biggest problem may still be getting an interaction started. Starting a conversation with a stranger; making a phone call to anyone, joining a conversation in progress.

On the other hand I may just be too tired to make sense -- my brain is pretty seriously fried tonight.

Comments

[mdlbear]

My older daughter knits -- chainmail.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Plain knitting, done with metallic cord, actually looks amazingly like real chainmail. And I'm sure you've seen costume-level chainmail made out of those metallic pot-scrubbing pads... those are knit, and then sort of rolled up like a sock, but if you unroll them carefully you can make costumes for the high school drama club's Shakespeare Festival that at least look like chainmail.

(Conversely, my son has a legitimate chainmail shirt, acquired in his LARPing days, which happens to look and fit exactly like a very loosely knit t-shirt. He sometimes wears it to go clubbing.)