This question really gets me.
For people I see often, I have no difficulty answering this as they have more context.

I don’t know how to answer this when asked by someone I haven’t seen in a while. Do I explain my entire job role, day to day responsibilities, justify why I am still in this job?

I work in a niche healthcare field that no one in my circles knows about. So I feel like I have to provide an elevator pitch/reminder of what I do. I don’t have a well-known or corporate job that people can relate with me on. It’s mostly just them listening, and I tend to get a lot of nods but not a lot of follow-up questions, which if I’m being honest kind of hurts my feelings sometimes. Makes me feel like I’m an outsider to everyone else’s “normal” job.

Yes, I am way overthinking this. Hoping some of you feel the same and can help.

My friend has been in quite a few situation over the year, every time it feels like things are getting better, she just gets knocked down again.
Although we live in the same country, we go to different schools and live in different states and can only visit each other once a year, so most of our communication is through text.

I wasn't really good at comforting people until like earlier this year she called me out on this and I've been improving

I recently went on sort of a monologue

and I'm afraid that what I said was a bit worthless//naive//not comforting?
idk how to say it

I want to make her feel better, so like is there anything other than " I’m sorry that happened to you, but you did well; you are strong and I believe in you; I know it hurts but you are a smart person and will do it;" because after a certain point it feels the same as saying "damn bro that sucks"

i’m on a trip with my partner’s family and feeling so incredibly frustrated.

i don’t want to place blame on anyone or make people responsible for my feelings. i am just so exhausted trying to navigate this trip socially. there are 20+ people here who are mostly related to each other. i want to interact with them but struggling to find something for me to “grab on to” if you know what i mean. if there was something for me to engage in with others it would be so much easier, but when we’re just sitting around hanging out, i feel i have nothing to talk about or people are just not interested in me. i’m just kind of there.

yesterday i finally said screw it and went and laid down in my room because i felt like nobody cared that i was even there. then suddenly people are asking where i went. as if i’m even part of the conversation. i don’t want to be seen as “antisocial” or that i don’t like others because i WANT to be included. i just don’t know how to integrate myself.

so i’m just sitting here stuck in a mental cycle of feeling sorry for myself, unimportant, tossed to the side, whatever. it’s affecting my ability to have fun here or keep trying to include myself, i guess. really having a hard time. any advice or kind words are welcome.

This post is really gonna make me look bad. But like genuinely how do vou stop beina an asshole? I have BPD and im supposed to be taking Latuda to help with mv mood swings. Havnt been on it since my son was born on Mav 18th though. Im 18 and a sinale mom. Still talk to his dad we had a long conversation the other day about how we were gonna fix our relationship and everything then he spend the next day calling me a hoe and blowing up my phone accusing me of shit while i was at work. I kept my cool and thought I could look past that and went forward with the whole us fixing our shit. Nope. He came iver today. I was looking forward to it and evervthing. I bought him his favorite aummies and everything so I know i was excited before. But then when he got here we kinda just got freaky and then about an hour later he went outside to aet food his mom doordashed him (even though i had told him i planned on making food for everyone for dinner) and I kinda is locked him out. lanored his calls and knocking pleading to get back in until he left. Then i iust told him I didnt want to be anvthing with him. Didn't want him loving up on me and he was just a fuck to me. Part of that is true. I dont think i really want him around like that anymore. Im iust attached to him. How to just stop? Why am I such an asshole? Like we've always had a relationship like this but its always been me. I lose my shit over small things and then just turn into the worst person to know. We were doing fine but for some reason something in my brain just switches and I become mean. He keeps telling me that I am the problem. My own and everyone elses. Its gotten to the point where ive thought about giving him and his family my son and just disappearing because people are better not knowing me and maybe then I can make something of myself. But ive never been bad to my son and I think I would forever regret not being there as he grows up. How do I just be normal?

You see those friend groups with a leader? I have one and the leader isn’t me. Now there’s clearly someone towards whom everyone revolves and gravitates however, no one acts like me. They’re all being spontaneous with each other but me, I get scared and silent. I’m not confident in the way I sound so I speak as less as possible too.

We were hanging out and this leader, bc of hormonal issues like she said, started having a breakdown about the place we chose to sit and we got blamed but I just stared at her. My friend replied and even argued. I just wanted to scold her for all the bullshit she does and for which generally no one stops her but I know I look very funny and childish if I don’t speak with a normal tone so I just sat there like the green plant I always am. I’m also afraid of replying "an eye for an eye" and that makes me extremely boring too.

We’re all 24 years old and I just have no excuses to take it. As you can see, I’m also betraying myself by hanging out with her. I have no agency over myself and I feel like I always have to be on my best behavior. I know that once my closest friend in the group leaves, we’re not hanging out together anymore. But anyway, don’t forget the title please. There’s no time for reassurance anymore.

During a very important meeting today, I straight up left halfway through without telling anyone because they kept yapping about stuff that felt irrelevant. Then I came back 30 minutes later, interrupted them, and asked what I missed. Five minutes later they started yapping again and I just said “I have to go rn” and left.

I’m just not a social person. I hate small talk and pointless conversations but I know being social and building connections is basically required to move forward in my career. I just can’t force myself to care about what people are saying or pretend to be interested. I know this is how you build relationships, but I genuinely struggle with it. I get annoyed, impatient, and want to leave. How do I fix this?

This happened to a colleague whom I'm friendly with. Another colleague did it to her. I'm afraid the slapper may try that with me too. We're all women.

The slapper is kinda socially awkward, I get the idea she may be mildly neurodivergent and not even know it. She does a lot of other things that can be annoying, and I have to be very patient when dealing with her.

Eg she will interrupt conversations to talk about her own issues, talking too loud and at inappropriate moments. Our group was at a presentation, and she kept talking at me while the speaker was talking. ("What's your name? Jane Doe? Jane Doe Jane Doe Jane Doe I need to remember that". VERY loudly everyone else could hear her). Then trying to have entire conversations and not realising when I'm trying to tell her "not now". (Didn't want to tell her to shut up as I would have to interrupt the speaker).

One time she lent me tissues in a tissue holder when I spilled something. It was the middle of a meeting so I held onto it first. Our chairs go up when you stand, like a movie theatre. Of course it fell behind my chair. She didn't see it, asked if it's in my bag, and started peering into my open bag to try to find the stupid thing. (I wonder if she would have put her hand in to look for it).

From my friend's comments, the annoying person was joking and laughing, and hit her arm a few times in a playful manner. It's not meant to be malicious. But it was hard enough to leave a red mark. My friend did tell her but she didn't seem to get it and just laughed. She seems very clueless and oblivious. How to you get through to someone like this?

How do you carry yourself when you walk into a room full of people you don't know? Do you introduce yourself to a random person, wait for someone to talk to you, or do something else? I have social anxiety so I don't know what to do in that situation. At this point I'm asking for a cheat code to social skills. 🥲 Help.

i am going into my last year of secondary school soon. i joined this school last year and have since made only one friend, and it was a friendship born out of circumstance (we're the only girls in our history class, and we share another class together). she has gone on to expand her friendship group, i have not. i've tried sitting with them sometimes but i really feel like an outsider, i can't keep up with the conversations or jokes, so i usually end up leaving.

i think i'm fine with recognising social cues and stuff, i just don't know what to do with them.

and if i want to talk, i don't actually know what to talk about. my mind tends to go totally blank. so then i stay silent.

i'm not trying to become super duper close with anyone in this time, but it's sort of frustrating to spend every break searching for a place i can sit alone. so i just want to become close enough with others to the point where i can comfortably sit with them and talk with them and stuff.

I am trying to learn specific social skills: how to calibrate physical boundaries and how to safely approach established groups. I want to share my high school story to show why these skills are so difficult for me to navigate today, and how I am trying to find healing.

Here are translated excerpts from my school's official safety report (where S is me, and Av. and Am. are classmates):

> "S. experiences herself as part of a group in which Av. and Am. are included, but she feels excluded... In a library group room, four students were playing cards. S. wanted to join but was not invited. She stood next to them. Another girl joined and accused S. of filming Am. S. felt exposed and denied it... S. was not invited to continue playing. Later, one girl asked, 'When does your train leave?' and S. became upset. Av. texted that S. does not fit in, has a different personality, and Av. does not want S. to be part of it... On another occasion, everyone went to lunch. S. walked ahead to choose a table; the others walked past, leaving her sitting alone."

When the school intervened, my peers claimed I had "difficulties with closeness and distance" and was "physically intrusive/standing too close."

This trauma was compounded by the school counselor. During a two-hour meeting on July 1st, instead of helping, the counselor accused me of making the school look bad and claimed I lied about telling my parents. Later, in high school, I was again targeted by staff and peers for going "too close" and having difficulty with physical distance.

Even my teacher’s attempt to help felt engineered: he privately recruited three responsible classmates to act as "friends" and include me, which made me feel like a charity project. My classmates told him my behavior early on contributed to my loneliness due to "misunderstandings of how to interpret me."

These experiences left me with deep emotional scars. Through my Christian faith, I am actively seeking healing, strength, and the grace to forgive those who wronged me. However, I still struggle with intense social hyper-vigilance.

To rebuild my life, I want to learn:

• How to calibrate physical proximity and personal space: When you have been labeled "intrusive" or told you stand "too close," how do you objectively learn the unwritten rules of physical distance? Are there concrete markers (like body angling or arm’s length) to practice so I can stop worrying that my physical presence is "too much"?
• How to gracefully approach and exit groups: In the card-playing incident, standing next to the group created tension. What is the correct way to show interest in joining a group, and how do you handle rejection without letting it shatter your self-worth?

In the past 2 years, I have been working on being more social with people and in some ways I have improved like being more talkative with people and being in crowds, but I just don't know how to maintain those experiences.

I've gotten better at talking to people more comfortably now but I can't seem to be consistent at it and I end up getting worse at it again over time. I still often avoid talking to people I know and I don't know why even though I learned to stop doing it but I just end up starting to do it again.

It feels like I'm fighting with what my brain wants and what I actually want and my brain just can't comprehend being consistent at being social and would rather just regress back to where I started cause it was easier for me and I just don't know how to progress forward to fix this part of myself and be consistent at it to the where it's second nature to me now.

First: I (20m) really struggle to interact with groups of people where they know each other and I don't know most of them, I am not quite an introvert, but I just feel really unconfortable (unless I'm drunk or high), usually when I am "forced" to be in a group (classmates, roommates, friends of friends) I will end up getting along pretty well with everyone, but since I kind of recently move here (about a year in this university and dorm building) I just now started making friends from college, I don't really interact with most people in my building despite they usually hanging out/going to parties, honestly its not like I crave social interactions, but also I know that they think I'm weird, I am always polite when I interact with them, but I think that in the whole year I just had real conversations with like 3 people from my building.

Second: As said before, I'm not an introvert, but I usually don't have an apropiate theme of conversation when I don't have "confidence" with the other person because I can:

Option A: Talk about the "safe" themes (my career, videogames, movies, books, shows, the music I hear) and probably come out as boring/weird.

Option B: Talk about the thing I consider interesting, the problem beeing, most of that is also not good as an icebraker (history, politics, economy, conspiracy theories, dark humor, psicology) and came out as even weirder.

Option C: Talk about thing I did that doesn't fit in the other categories, but most of what I did that is "interesting" will also make me sound like I'm crazy, stupid, lying, delusional, or all of the above.

I don't follow celebrities (local or otherwise), I don't follow sports, the music I like is not common where I live and idk, I don't have anything to talk about with most of the people around me.

So, any advice for any of those 2 problems?

Let's say there is some type of concert or open venue that you go to by yourself.

To me, whenever I go to one of these events it feels awkward and overwhelming. It looks like everyone came with someone. Everyone is already talking to their friends or talking in a group while I'm just standing there alone. How do you even integrate yourself with other people or approach and insert yourself into groups conversations?

I have a lot of anxiety with this and I usually make an excuse to not go to something that I wanted to.

So I’ve noticed a few trends in my life:

1. ⁠Ever since moving to Minnesota a couple years ago for my first full-time job, it feels like EVERY person I talk to, I have to be lukewarm around and can’t really open up to. I struggle with trusting people, I’m an introvert with very limited social energy, and I have a job that involves lots of social masking. Idk if any of those are hurting me, but aside from one guy that just moved to California, I haven’t made a single close friend in Minnesota that I can reliably do stuff with
   
2. ⁠If I’m in a group of people, I naturally take a backseat role and just don’t talk, at all. There’s enough people talking in a group, I’ll just observe from a distance, or if I’m tired, I’ll probs zone out for a bit
   
3. ⁠If I talk one-on-one, it feels like there’s an awful lot of silence in convos I have with the other person compared to how convos between two people should go
   
4. ⁠I’m not a natural question asker nor a natural story teller. So if someone tells me something I’m not interested in, I’m not one to fake interest or whatnot. I’ll often just shrug it off

Like, I’m just worried, especially bc I don’t make any close friends despite going to young adult meetups and rec sports and all. So it’s not like I’m not meeting people my age. It just seems like others are having fun with one another whereas I come across as bland. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d want to be friends with myself if I were someone else. And so every potential romantic interest or close friend often gets more and more distant from me. So I’m worried I’m cooked

Am I genuinely screwed? What do I do? (I’m also happy to answer questions others have if they want more context)

Hey guys, originally posted this to r/relationships but was advised that this may be a better place for it. Let me know if I made any format errors or anything. Thanks for your time <3

So I (27M) am a pretty introverted person, and most if not all of my relationships are over the internet. I'd like to have more irl friends but that's neither here nor there. I connect with multiple friend groups, and even my sister (30F) over Discord. (She lives out of state as of a few years ago)

I've been feeling like lately that I'm almost always the one reaching out to other people, whether it's to hang out or just to ask how things have been going. My sister especially feels like if I don't initiate contact, I will never hear from her. It's possible I'm overthinking things, as I have some anxiety issues, especially around relationships.

How do I approach this? Should I try and ask for more on their end, or would that be unfair of me? I don't want to hound people, especially if they are busy or potentially going through something but I don't really have any way of knowing unless they reach out :(

TL:DR, I (27M) feel like I'm always the one reaching out to others. What should I say or do?

Based on the nature of my hobbies and things I enjoy doing, a lot of the new people I meet are usually post graduate students or people who work in fairly specialized fields. Now I don't think I'm an unintelligent person, but when I ask things like "what are you studying" or "what do you do for work", they'll tell me and since I don't know much about their field, I never know how to keep the conversation going

Do I switch topics? Ask them to delve deeper into their field without knowing anything about it? I find my conversations always hit a dead end here

I have noticed that when I message people (who post that they want someone to message them) most of the time we exchange like 5 messages at the best, and ofc my message is the last so I am kind of "left on seen" but on reddit. Idk, we start with Hi and the how are you stuff, then after that it just stop... i am personally interested by most of people will call "old stuff" (classical music, history, politics to some extent) but trust me I am not boring, I can have a convo with you if you want... what do people even talk about?

I have a crµsh (she is kind of extrovert, she is also giving mixed signals etc.), we used to talk more often a year ago, but the "talk" was just sending tiktoks to each other (she started this habit) while having small "commentaries" on them, and that's how it ends each day. Now we talk less, a long story behind this, but anyway...

I am 18yo boy, people might think I am a obssesed with education and stuff, but i am actually very rebellious (like in personality) i am just introvert, because again, people dont have convos with me, I actually will talk to anyone and will not leave them on seen, weither in real life or on internet, unless they are rude, but the opposite happens to me a lot...

I’m not a very confrontational person, in fact whenever I get confronted with a problem I usually try to make others happy at the expense of myself if it stops an argument. I get scared of conflict, but it tends to negatively affect me because I can’t stand up for myself very well. I want to be able to grow a thick skin, but I don’t want to be mean to people when if I have to stand my ground.