“…busy social settings…“

I am going to cut and paste my portion from an email discussion about overcoming party shyness and call that my daily post. But let’s see if I can keep posting every day. I mean this is day three, this counts as a streak. I like the italics on Medium.

One thing I’ve found in busy social settings is how it’s totally okay to sit for a minute and nurse a drink quietly and confidently while observing the proceedings. You are not a pariah. You’re just somewhere between weird and mysterious. If someone comes up to you, you go “Oh, just getting my breath.”

Also, the real key to social situations is in making introductions. I spend a lot of my time at events learning who people are and rapid-fire introducing them. Everyone seems to like that. “What brings you here?” Etc. Aggressively introducing people you’ve just met to other people you’ve just met is really sanity-making if you’ve like, just given a reading or done something on a stage or given a talk. You want to flee so bad. You’ve just been judged by so many people.

But you can actually hang out and go, “Hey! What’s your name? Jim? And you! What’s your name? Sue? Jim have you met Sue? What do you guys do?” Etc. I actually like making intros whereas actually talking about myself to strangers is the stuff of nightmares because I’m chubby and boring and need a haircut and I have five stories total.