There's a hypothesis about introversion and the energy drain we introverts feel around others, which claims that this drain comes from social anxiety. It also posits that in order to stop feeling drained, introverts ought to "just" gain more confidence, and with that, they'll be able to sail through everything and stop feeling drained!

First, fuck you.

Second, the world that I live in is like this: I will be spending time with people I like, who seem to like me, who I have had a lot of fun with. I will let my guard down around them. I will say or do something that seems in line with what the rest of the crowd has been saying, or that I have done before with the same crowd.

Suddenly, I am scolded or otherwise rebuked, because I have managed to violate some subtle rule of conduct. It's never stuff like, oh, say, installing a "security" lock on my office door and using it to demand that someone bang me. Perhaps it's the Barrayar-esque rule that we don't make that salty a reference in mixed company, despite the fact that the ladies present get that salty in my presence, and the gentlemen present also get that salty in my presence (my gender is a chameleon, apparently). Perhaps it's roleplaying etiquette. Perhaps it's that I didn't think of one specific person when writing in 140 characters to an audience of hundreds.

Are the rules necessary? Possibly! Would I have violated them if I'd been hypervigilant about everything? Possibly not! Sometimes it's things that I should have seen if I'd thought things through fully. Sometimes it's stuff you don't know about until you run into it. But in any case, you're much less likely to run into such things if you're watching your every move. And you've upset people, and that's terrible.

So that's how you learn: in order to make sure your horrible and socially malfunctioning ass doesn't spread its horrible social violations where the nice people will be horrified by them (and you), you watch yourself. Carefully. Keeping track of what's said, and who's said it, reading the room, and erring on the side of quietness.

There are respites. There are the friends where you have such a stock of built-up goodwill that it doesn't matter if you fuck up in little ways, because they trust you to fix it when you hurt them, and you trust them likewise. So you do your best to never screw up that way a second time, and you move on. Those are the friends who don't expect you to be People. It's still work, but worth it, and it's much less likely that you'll do something that will make them stop talking to you altogether.


Sometimes I wonder what life would been like if I hadn't been raised in a cabin in the woods without television.