I was just glancing at my calendar of the past four weeks or so. There's not much in it but there are one or two social entries per week on average which sum up the extent of my social life. At the start of the year I made a conscientious decision to make efforts to step outside of my comfort zone of a hermit's cocoon and attempt to connect with fellow human beings. For the average person this may seem a relatively trivial and insignificant step, but for someone with social anxiety, deep-rooted insecurities and other mental health challenges it can seem like a bridge too far. Nevertheless, I've persevered and continue to try and indulge in a couple of social events pretty much weekly. This is in an effort to satisfy a real need for human connection, something which has always been difficult and elusive due to personal awkwardness, anxiety and uncertainty. These are qualities which I've always been afflicted with but which I am trying to address at this stage of my life through means of personal growth and pushing some personal boundaries towards experiences that may challenge my personality complexes. My theory is, that if I can gain new experiences in trying to connect with others, then I can learn from this and develop into a more balanced individual that people might actually want to spend time with. The practice is yielding mixed results for which I shall provide some examples from the aforementioned diary!
Kicking off with the start of the month, the first entry in my diary was a lecture on the philosophy of medicine! I know, random, but it was the indication of a drinks reception that was to follow that clinched the deal! I won't go into the details of the lecture now, because I don't remember any of it, apart from the fact that a medical outcome is predicated by factors which, if altered, would not necessarily revert the outcome to an expected value, as all factors are variables whose contributory effects cannot be predicted with certainty. Basically, everything is down to a best guess: your medical treatment might work as expected; or it might not. Anyway, I digress. Following on from an hour's worth of enlightenment, accompanied throughout by pretty pictures and formulas with lots of squiggly symbols projected onto a big screen, I found myself at the greatly anticipated drinks reception. I scooped up the glass of red wine that appeared the most full from those on the table and proceeded to look around as people gathered. There was a throb of voices filling the room and I realised that people were quickly mingling and talking whilst I was still finding myself alone with a steady and unfaltering build up of social anxiety to keep me company.
At some point I realised I was on my second glass of red wine and still hadn't interacted with anyone. There was a woman standing very close by. Before I knew it, "Good evening! How did you find the lecture?" I exclaimed, trying to look and sound natural, concealing my anxiety as best as I could. It seemed to work. Yeap, I'm pretty sure I got away with it! We got a conversation going about philosophy and medicine. I imparted the extent of my knowledge about the subject in sixty seconds, which was about outcomes not being predictable with certainty because of factors which are random variables, or something along those lines, and she reciprocated in kind with her knowledge on the subject based on the Ph.D. she'd just completed on the subject. Not long after, she parted company with, "I just need to go and talk to my friend!". I put that down to a success, relatively speaking. With a somewhat newfound confidence, of sorts, no doubt fuelled by one point seven five glasses of red wine, and counting, I scanned the room in some sort of three hundred and sixty degree fashion. On spotting a group with what I perceived as open body language I rocked right up and said "Hi. How is everyone?". Silence, cursory glances from two of the four in the group, the other two stepping back from me, and a continuing silence. Yes, the tumbleweed effect. Then the four continuing their deliberations as if I was not present, visible or audible.
That, for me, was enough of a confidence-shattering knockback to elicit a beeline for the exit. It doesn't take much to shatter an already fragile state; fragility does dot harbour resilience. I feel content that I am at least stepping out into territory that remains a personal challenge, never knowing what perils may be lurking in the nooks and crannies of the complex social fabric of human connectedness. I knew the woman didn't necessarily need to go and talk to her friend; the politeness of etiquette masks the true meaning, which translates to "I'm now bored with you and uninterested in what you have to say, so I am going to go and find someone else to talk to with whom I may feel a little bit more excited about". There is no problem, of course, with wanting to do exactly that, but the result of getting such reactions continually serves as a reinforcement of social inadequacy and degraded self-image. At least though, she adhered to the accepted rules of social grace. Contrast this with the tumbleweed encounter, the rebuttal of which, with the complete absence of social etiquette, left me frazzled to the point of requiring immediate departure from the proceedings of the evening.
On leaving, my mind entered a deep and complex analytical phase that is customary for someone with heavily introspective inclinations and a continual compulsion to seek insight and understanding. I went through, in my mind, the sequence of events at the gathering, from how I stood, how I looked, what I said, how I said it, how people were affected by me, how they reacted to me, what they said, how they said it, how they moved, where they looked and what they did and did not do. Every piece of information went through an internal interrogation system through the filter of my own experience, conscious, unconscious and outworldly. If the factors that dictated events during the evening had been different, how would possible outcomes have been altered, and could any of these have been predicted with any level of certainty? Or is the entirity of life just one big metaphysical melting pot of variables in a continual state of flux?
PS. The Ph.D. woman might be able to offer some clues, unless she's still talking to "her friend", in which case she might be too intoxicated to be able to do so by now; she too was on the wine.
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