Days 2 & 3 - 30 Day Small Talk Challenge with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

Day 2 Interaction 1 - Paralysis by Analysis There's this other male student that frequents at the library. We've just awkwardly greeted for about a year and there's an uncomfortable tension when I see him. He's not intimidating by any means but I get this feeling of worthlessness mentioned in my previous post. So I stopped to talk with him and asked how his studying was going and he mentioned how our surgery lecturers are retarded and aren't academic enough to teach. There was an awkward pause because there's so much shit regarding our surgery block that I could talk about but my mind blanked out and took me a few seconds to pick one and talk about. What I realized:

• there's no perfect thing to talk about. The conversation is not necessarily about the content but rather its a way to bond with someone else over something common. Pick any thing and go with it.
• Socializing is fatiguing. or is it? May be warming up with a lower stress interaction helps with more stressful ones.
• Coffee seems to make me more talkative (good!) but too much of it makes me get panic attacks.

Interaction 2 - Teach me Or I'll Keep Teasing Goals in this interaction was to talk to a HB7+ (the obviously bitchy kind with many friends and a permanent smirk on her face) for the first time and also meet my minimum daily target: talk to 2 people I'm uncomfortable talking to. She does this stupid pen flicking trick and I opened with an indirect tease. I said "I've seen a few people do this and I was curious if you have to consciously concentrate on doing this trick or can do it involuntarily" (this implies she's just trying to show off and not actually studying). She took it well saying it's voluntary and showed me how to do it.

• What I realized: Girls tend to have this frightened (creeped out) expression after the first few words I utter I used to believe it's due to my demeanor or something physical. But I'm starting to realize it's just because they don't expect to be approached (I live in a super conservative middle eastern country; my setting is my college's library where we were sitting on a shared table). But if I keep talking, they become super friendly and comfortable. So I shouldn't take it personally immediately and gauge her interest just a little bit more before deciding it's a failed interaction. Since I'm studying for my finals I don't actually give a shit about spinning pens, I started to get stressed out and simply politely stopped her and asked her to teach me at another time. I feel like if I kept it going longer my heart would explode. Not really overwhelmed by her but rather my ability to do side quests while under pressure.

Day 3 Interaction 1 - Too Guilty to Proceed.

• I saw the android tablet girl from the first day and since I had nothing to say I jokingly reminded her that she was supposed to teach me a certain language. She replied with "Its the finals isn't it?" Just for context, we're both med students. I'm final year and she's a year my junior. I tried to maintain composure and walked away. This was possible since I was actually hurrying to go somewhere else and my posture enabled me to easily downplay what she says and disengage. What I realized: I feel really bad for actually causing harm (wasting her time during the finals by taking her time to talk with me). In other words, I feel like my needs should be sacrificed to protect that of others. I do this a lot actually. So I felt guilty and didn't want to waste more of her time and quickly disengaged. May be next time I should drag it longer and wait for them to make it clear they have other shit to do or when the posture indicates they're disinterested. In this case she actually stopped to face me and was laughing though the thought of doing this is still disturbing and feels wrong. I'm curious what's your attitude and mindset towards these kinds of situations?
• This affected me significantly. It changed my mood from neutral to bad. Feeling like crap. I don't know why/ May be I thought about her (and our interaction) too much over the days and started developing feelings for her (early stage oneitis/emotionally investing in her) and her shit-testing me hurt my ego (in other words, someone I 'care' about doesn't really give a shit about me). Writing this is horrifying. It means I haven't learned from my prior mistake.

Interaction 2 - Former Enemies

• The awkward guy I talked about on Day 2 - Interaction 1; Approached me today and asked for a small favor (asked me to notify him if there's an empty seat). My impression of him was such that we didn't really like each other (I think we both found each others proximity awkward) What I'm realizing - May be frequency of interactions with a person builds more trust and is probably a good way to build rapport.

Interaction 3 - Not Feeling Like It

• Nothing special just chatting with two friends despite not wanting to do so.

30 Day Small Talk Challenge with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

I have always hated interacting with people I don't know well and especially hate making small talk. Unfortunately it seems like a part of building social status is by having plenty of social relations. My specific circumstances are as follows: I have generalized anxiety disorder and am introverted (socializing is fatiguing.) I tend to fixate on past failures and repeatedly beat myself over them. For example I still occasionally remember and feel bad (mainly worthless) for a oneitis rejecting me 6 months ago.

I have recently made more efforts to socialize (eg, talking to a cute girl at the library and installing Youtube Revanced for her; that was way out of my comfort zone and made me realize some mistakes, more on that later.)

My motivations for starting this challenge:

• Two of my friends let's call them O and Z made remarks about my awkward social behaviors the former just spontaneously joked about me saying one day I will shoot up the whole college with an AK and the former criticizing me for not responding to someone greeting me (my rationalization is that I don't know the person so why would I greet them but I feel like the real reason is that my anxiety discourages me since I'm afraid I will sound awkward when responding [I don't like the sound of my voice] or I will be seen as pathetic [more on that later]).

• On rare days when I happen to be in the mood to talk with relatively many people, I tend to ruminate less on my past social failures. I believe doing more social interactions dilutes the effect of the bad ones since they become a minority of my experience.

• I think as a part of my GAD I have these delusions of everyone being disappointed in me and seeing me as an underdeveloped failure (i'm underweight, i know i need to fix that and I'm short, that i can't fix feasibly.) When I meet a stranger, especially older or larger males for some reason, my immediate assumption is that they hate me, want to hurt me, or at best, are disappointed in me and see me as immature. I hope that by talking with more people these delusions will go away. I should probably emphasize this point more.

I'm officially starting this challenge today but unintentionally started it a few days ago (with the autistic Revanced Rizz). That experience made me realize that I physically react too strongly (ie, fast, sudden movements, exaggerated facial expressions, voice very out of control [too loud, too quiet, a sense of panic in my voice/stuttering]

Day 1:

• I chatted with girl (super sweet person but not attractive) about her unusual name. What was special about this interaction: I was in a bad mood, my common vulnerable victim mood, that normally paralyzes me preventing me from getting anything done or being interested in ANY social interaction. Yet I forced myself to talk with her and talk about something completely trivial and unimportant. This interaction actually did help pull me out of my bad mood.

• Right after that I went up to my friend O and showed him a picture of an M249 (my fav LMG from a childhood game) and joked about using it instead of an AK since it has a much larger magazine capacity.