Meeting New People

When I was little, I used to be shy. Tyler would get candy to sell from the Y, and we would traipse around the rich neighborhoods of our city selling $1 bars door to door. Mom trailed us in the car but never approached the homes (since kids selling candy is cute, but an adult selling candy is kind of pathetic). Tyler chatted with whoever would come to answer the bell or knock, always beginning with “Hi would you like to buy a candy bar to help support the YMCA daycamp?” delivered all in one breath, but ending up talking about other things, like the weather, or his Fagan league baseball team, or whatever the potential buyer wanted to talk about.

I stood mute through these conversations, contributing nothing. But I must have picked up a thing or two, because sometime in adolescence, I realized that I could do it: I could meet new people.

In fact, I can be excellent at meeting new people. I can be accommodating to the point of solicitude, friendly to the point of seeming genuinely nice, especially with people I wouldn’t normally get along with or can’t relate to. I’ve developed an ability to chat, and smile, and encourage, and to ask questions that indicate an appropriate level of interest. I can even be impressive, I’ve been told, in this area.

But it’s not the core version of me. It’s like a parallel-universe-Alicia. It’s an exploration of what I would have been like as an extrovert – like trying on a wig to see what you’d be like as a redhead. It takes a lot of energy to sustain this, especially when I’m still figuring out how to relate to the new people I’m meeting. Once it’s settled into “person X likes to discuss her pet” or “person Y believes in astral body projection,” I’m usually okay. We just talk about that topic incessantly for however long I know them.

Which is not often long for people with whom I carry on these types of conversations. They rarely go anywhere, very rarely break through into some real human connection.

This is not the case with people with whom I could be real friends. In fact, I identify potential real friends often by whether I switch over into solicitude upon meeting them. If I am still myself – sarcasm and awkward-skeptical foibles intact – it’s a good sign. Still, there’s that awkward phase to get through, as in all friendships, of trying to find some way of showing that you’re interested in being friends without being a pathological weirdo; I mess this up more often than I’d like to recall. (Possibly because I am a pathological weirdo, which is a difficult thing to hide.)

There are, however, even more potential obstacles, besides my absurd ability to say exactly the wrong things in exactly the wrong ways, which I retain well beyond the beginning of friendship. In my malleable, solicitous, meeting-new-people state, I can end up saying things or laughing at things or possibly doing things that are disagreeable to me, in an effort to be an agreeable and apparently sane person. I could, for instance, continually repeat a simple-but-false explanation for why I’m doing whatever I’m doing; to give a specific example, I was once instructed to go with a teammate in China to help a senior German woman fix her computer, despite my total lack of computer knowledge, and for a ridiculous reason. I could not tell her why I was actually there, as the reason was too complicated and would embarrass us all, so I continually repeated the slightly-less-embarrassing reason that I had wanted to see her apartment – and felt increasingly idiotic. Once I get into these situations, it’s almost impossible for me to get myself out. Later, I groan and wish never to be confronted by those people’s version of me again, which more or less precludes ever seeing them in the future.

It’s also nearly impossible for me to interact with people of different categories at the same time; if there is a real friend about, and a new person, I find it exceedingly difficult to attend to both. I often opt for ignoring the real friend until later, when I can theoretically explain, since this seems less rude than ignoring the new person – but they are equally rude in reality, and I almost never do explain, since I find this flaw embarrassing. Add to this that my offense is proportional to my desire to not-offend: the more I would wish to talk to the real friend, the more likely I am to talk to the new person, and vice-versa. I over-compensate in an effort not to be rude, thus ending up being much ruder than I would otherwise have been.

And then there’s my personal tradition of telling people more than they ever wanted to know, directly, which is mainly under control but does return with a vengeance every so often. This may be the most horrifying of all, since unlike with my other troubles, I can’t use the excuse that they just didn’t get to know the real me; the problem is that they did.

This is a baffling set of behaviors that causes me to wonder how anyone, ever, has decided to befriend me. (Crying, mainly. I burst into tears at some point.)

But the good news is – and I’ve been told this by more than one real friend – that I improve in the knowing. So don’t give up.

I’ll get better, I swear.