I don't often suffer episodes where I wish I could pull do-overs on nearly my whole life, but I'm in one right now. It seems like everyone else in the entire world must have more skill interacting with people than I do. I don't like being bad at something. well, something that I want to be good at, anyway.

Part of the problem is that I'm a morning person, and when I stay up late at a party, I get tired, and when I get tired, my natural tendency to speak without thinking (and therefore with less-than-average cohesion) strengthens. Me tired = me drunk, for all practical purposes. Also/therefore, my powers of decisionmaking, merely average at the best of times, tend to disappear, and my curiosity and desire to not miss anything strengthen to the point that I am susceptible to charges of being the guest that would not leave. The most frustrating part of this is that I can be aware of that danger, afraid of it, sensitive to such charges, and yet do nothing to avoid them (cf. tired = drunk). I would rather know the end of the story.

I subject myself and my host(s) to that fear/possibility, I think, because I simply do not understand some people, and I want to understand. I have never been one who really enjoys large parties for themselves, except for times when I can dance to music I love; an unguarded conversation with a few friends in a not-loud place is much more my speed. Often at a large party, those environments only start to appear later, when many partygoers have already gone.

Except that I have trouble even then. I am perfectly happy to listen to other people talk, and maybe throw in a line from time to time (more often, the more comfortable I feel with the person(s)), but it's hard for me to really interview somebody, think of lots of good questions to ask, to lead into territories of depth. I do better than I used to, but I'm still bad at it. Then (or afterwards) I begin to fear that because I didn't ask much, they might think I wasn't interested in them.

The fear that troubles me this weekend is, what if they are right? In my own way of thinking, it's not true, but what if I am (or have been successfully impersonating) a completely self-centered twit who creates her own simplistic land of imagination to play in, mistaking it for reality, and I haven't even been aware of it? That might explain why I don't seem to have many friends in the same ways that other people seem to have friends, not to mention the historical lack of boyfriends.

And if that is true, what do I do now?

copyright 2003 carrie lynn king.