Social Studies

Write about social awkwardness

That’s the note I left myself last night before I went to bed. I put it in Word and left it open on my computer so I wouldn’t forget it. A miracle occurred and I didn’t forget it and now I’m going to write about social awkwardness. The key to making things foolproof is to know your fool, I know myself.

This is inspired by this article in the New York Times, We’re All Socially Awkward Now. When I posted this on Facebook people responded by saying “I was always socially awkward.” Some of those people don’t act awkwardly to me. Some people that are socially awkward have no idea that they are. People are terrible judges of their own social skills. That includes me. I always feel uncomfortable in social situations. I feel that I’m always saying and doing the wrong thing. One benefit of therapy is having someone to objectively tell me that I’m wrong about that. I can remember awkward comments I’ve made going back to childhood. One has haunted me since I was ten. While it’s true I said and did those things, I’m wrong because that’s cherry picking the data. If I were as awkward as I feel I wouldn’t have as many friends. People would not be happy to see me. Intellectually I know I have social skills, emotionally I feel like I’m lying when I say that. My guess is that many of you are in the same boat. It’s not a boat, it’s a ship, an enormous ship, a veritable floating city.

There are some people that seem to have it so together yet do thing that make them appear clueless. You go?  “How could they have said that?” Yet you think of them as socially skilled. They have that aura. That’s just as much a delusion. We might not even agree who has that aura and who doesn’t. It’s gut feelings which is another word for prejudice.

The truth is we are all mixtures of awkward and smooth and so much of it comes down to which we pay attention to. I’m not saying that there’s no difference. We know there are some people that are almost always clueless, and others where it’s much rare. If we don’t see them as often we might think they never make gaffs. The problem that politicians and celebrities have, is that everything is on record and there are those that are all too gleeful to point out the gaffs. I can always remind myself that I’m not as clueless as “that person.” I have to translate this so remove all identifiers. Someone I know said a more specific version of these two statements consecutively.

“I’m not going to follow Rule 1.”

“X is saying that they won’t follow Rule 1. When will they learn that they can’t always have their way?”

Then my phone rang. I talked for over an hour. Then I had a snack. Then I took a shower.  I now have no idea where this was going.

Social skills are like most things, they follow a bell curve. Most people are in the fat part of the curve. Some are more towards the extremes but there’s almost always more room on either side and we find it hard to place ourselves on the curve. I’m sure there’s plenty of Dunning-Kruger effect involved. The least socially skilled are the worst at evaluating social skills and the best will be too hard on themselves. It sounds like I’m convincing myself to think about this far less often as my thinking will be faulty. I am what I am, just like Popeye and God.