nonstandardrepertoire:

• the ice tea is Different here. you try to remember the various regionalisms — is there sugar? lemon? caffeine? — but you’re right on the border between two zones. (you are always right on the border between two zones.) the beverage that finally comes is acrid and smoky, and you drink it while actively trying not to examine it any more closely
• the burgers, on the other hand, are exactly the same. this diner calls it something different, something special, something unique, but it is the same burger you had last night, which was also called something different, something special, something unique. not the same as that burger, but exactly the same burger. you have eaten this burger every night of your life. you look around at the other diners and wonder if each of you has your own burger, or if you are all, every single one of you, biting down perpetually into one eternal, ever-recycled meal
• the speed limit is dropping, as tho you are coming to a town. you would like to find a town. you are tired, your car needs gas, and you could use a break. the speed limit drops from 70 to 55, 45, 30, 25. you have not passed a welcome sign. the speed limit is 10. the road stretches ahead, shimmering under the sun, the landscape around it barren and desolate. the speed limit is 5
• you are on a meandering back road between two nowheres. inexplicably, there is a heavy truck in front of you. there is nowhere to pass for miles and miles, until at last you reach a long flat stretch and zip around, zoom ahead. you turn the next corner, and find another truck in your way. it is the same truck
• the highway you are traveling along somehow carries routes going in all four cardinal directions at once. you try to remember whether you were aiming for the state route or the interstate, but all the signs seem to be for county roads. did you need to go west or north across Nebraska anyway? you try to gauge your direction from the angle of the sun, but it is shrouded in impenetrable clouds
• there are police cars studded every ten miles along this road, crudely hidden behind foliage, around bends. as you pass one — slowly — you look inside and notice there is no one. it is a shell, a malevolent carapace, a scarecrow designed to slow down rather than speed up flight. the husks increase in density until there are vast, glittering piles on either side of the roadway, blocking out any view of the landscape beyond. the drivers with local plates are doing 90 in a 65
• you see a sign giving the distance to the next town. it’s an hour away. you drive on, and twenty minutes later, you see another sign giving the distance to that town. it is still an hour away. it has been an hour away for as long as you can remember
• it is day seven of your trip. it is not actually day seven of your trip, but every morning you tell yourself it is, because seven seems like a nice number. you’ve still got a few days to go on day seven, but by day seven, surely the bulk of the driving is behind you. surely, you tell yourself. the bulk of the driving. behind you. that’s what it means to be on day seven, which is the day you are on. if you are cheerful enough in your morning humming, you sometimes forget that you told yourself this yesterday as well, and that you are already planning to tell it to yourself again tomorrow
• there is road work ahead

theunitofcaring:

So the way I’d look at it is that there could be two things contributing to this feeling. One is irrational anxiety – even when everything is doing great, part of your brain is convinced that it isn’t, and makes up justifications for believing that things are awful. The other is ‘correctly picking up on being kind of annoying to some people’. 

Now, there are obviously some competing needs here – spelling out anything about the fact that some people, anywhere, ever, are correctly picking up on being kind of annoying to other people just fuels other peoples’ anxiety – but I also feel like this is a drawback of social anxiety advice which doesn’t acknowledge that, because it just sounds fake to a lot of people and also if you don’t have any direct conversations about ‘being kind of annoying to some people’ then it feels utterly disastrous when in fact, as I’ll get to, it’s not actually that big of a deal even if it’s true.

So firstly – regardless of which of these things is going on, I think you should consider getting help with anxiety. Constant fear that’s keeping you from interacting with friends is really unhealthy. It’s really unhealthy even if someone actually kinda doesn’t like you. Constant fear isn’t just a bad state to be in if it’s unjustified – it’s a bad state to be it whether it’s justified or not. Anxiety is hell on your quality of life. It taints nice things and taints anticipation of future nice things and makes it harder to reach out and take them and makes you feel like all this is your fault. You should try some options to treat it. I recommend Scott’s Things That Sometimes Work If You Have Anxiety. I recommend it regardless of what’s going on here, because ‘constant fear’ is enough reason to prioritize anxiety treatment even if you haven’t settled whether those fears are justified.

Secondly – some people are really good at making other people feel valued and appreciated and welcome. I’m not personally very good at this. Some people have the instinct to beam at their friends and say “oh good, you’re here!” Some people think of their friends when their friends aren’t around and send them links that remind them of you, or buy friends things they know they’ll appreciate.  It didn’t even occur to me until my twenties that this was why people liked them. I think the rationalist community contains lots of people who aren’t great at this, which means that sometimes we have less than the normal number of cues flowing that people appreciate each other, which probably makes peoples’ anxiety-about-fitting-in worse. 

Note that this is not “I’m so grateful to you for hanging out with me”, which is what some people do and which I don’t recommend. This is “oh, hey, you! I enjoy your company! Come over here and do things with me!” I recommend putting in the effort to express that towards people you feel it for; it might not help with your anxiety (though it might) but it will probably help with theirs, and often get reciprocated.

Thirdly, people are usually willing to give a medium amount of social feedback. They are not willing to give an unlimited amount; if you want to ask them every time you meet them ‘are you annoyed with me now’ then they will get tired of this. But most people you’ve hung out with for an afternoon will respond positively at the end of that afternoon to asking once ‘hey, I’m trying to be more social, do you have any advice for me?” and if they’re annoyed with you then they’ll mention things like “interrupt less” or “yeah when you get on that topic it’s hard to get you off it” or “you did ask out every girl in the room” or whatever. You can’t get advanced advice this way but you can definitely get some social information, so if you’re not going to explode in agony over interpreting any information you get it’s a fine way to ask. If you’ll explode in agony, then see step one: treat anxiety.

Fourthly, if some people find you mildly annoying, then that’s actually fine. You probably find some people mildly annoying, right? And it’s fine. One kind of anxiety is fixating on having universal approval, which you don’t need and which no one can get, instead of some approval, which you do need and which I’m confident you can get. Often when people leave an event going “what if they hated me” they’re imagining that, like, everyone else is going to cast a vote and decide the same way, instead of some people liking others and some disliking and lots not paying attention. Just replacing “they hated me” with “Bob hated me and Alice was in a bad mood for unrelated reasons and no one else was paying any attention” makes your picture of the world a lot more realistic and less scary – even if you’re right about Bob. 

sachertortes:

I really wish there was an option on those Customer Service Surveys that says specifically, “The representative I spoke to was lovely and helpful and deserves all of the raises but I think that you, as a corporation, should die in a fire.”