Confessions of a Closet Introvert

Introverts Suck at Keeping Friends (and making them, too)

I find this is something most introverts can relate to.

Not to brag or anything, but I'm a pretty fun person to be around. No, scratch that, I'm downright adorable. So one would think an adorable person such as myself would be able to attract friends and admirers pretty easily, but it's not that simple.

Before someone gets to know me and becomes familiar with my adorability (I don't think that's a word), we have to actually talk to each other first. That's where I have the difficulty.

I really, really suck at talking to people. Either I am too weird for conversation, too shy for conversation, or too boring for conversation. Even my own friend told me while I was in the middle of talking, "This has been a long and boring story." And she was right. It was about the air conditioning at our school (seriously, I was telling a story about the AC. How do I have any friends?)

I think the problem is that I hate small talk more than life, and when I see my friends and feel inclined to speak to them but don't have anything to say, I end up telling a boring story about something mundane because I don't have a life and refuse to use small talk. And then, the people I'm talking to get bored and don't invite me to do fun things with them because I don't seem like a fun person. This only worsens my vicious cycle as I continue to have no interesting stories to tell due to no social life.

And when I do have things to talk about, I get weird. Everyone reading this who is my friend IRL knows what I'm talking about, too. I just can't help that the things I think make complete sense in my head but absolutely no sense out loud.

As for being too shy, I just am too bashful to start conversations with a lot of people who I'm not already friends with. There was this one time when I went to see a concert that my crush was in at another school and my friends literally had to push me down several different hallways to get me to talk to this guy. And I had no reason to be so nervous, because we were already friends and we had a pleasant conversation then, but I just had this irrational fear of even saying "hello" to him.

But when I do manage to talk to people and make friends, I don't know how to keep them. I just never have ideas of things to do with my friends, especially in groups. So while a bunch of my friends all get together to do things, I'm still trying to think of something we could all do together. And when I do arrange some of these group things to do, there's always someone who the idea doesn't work for.

On the upside, I have had a lot of free time on my Christmas break due to my lack of social coordination, enough time to paint and draw two pictures (one of which is above), knit four scarves, buy a guitar, and write a song with my new guitar. So, super productive break.

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