I used a voice to text app to write this out. Not formatted or edited. Might do later. Might not,. Just reflections and learnings on my social confidence. The TLDR is I went to see a movie with 20 actors and felt a bit of social insecurity. Reminded me of being in high school and being best friends with the popular kid, without actually being popular myself, and how much I felt like I had to try too hard just to fit in when I was his Plus-One at parties. But I was able to pick apart what the actual insecurities were and where they came from, which gives me a lot to work with. Also explains my DD recon in more depth.
A friend of mine had a role in one of the big movies playing in theaters right now, so me and 20 of his friends went and saw it in theater together. The theater wasn’t too packed, the movie released a while ago, so every time his face came on screen, all of us would cheer, and any time his character did something bad, we would all boo at him. It was fun.
But hanging out with 20 actors, some legit, some aspiring, brought up old social insecurities, I started talking to my fiancé about them. And I had more realizations about how my experiences being bullied in high school affected the way that I see the world socially. Pretty much everything that I realized are the things that have been affecting me socially for the last decade and I’ve never been able to articulate or understand. I have no idea what product exactly helped me with these realizations. I assume it was Emperor Daddy, but I’m just happy I’m having them. I realized that hanging out with my friends’ friends felt like all the times in high school that I was invited to a party only because my popular friend was invited to a party. I was kind of a loser in high school, but my best friend was the number one most popular guy in school, so he would get invited everywhere and he wouldn’t go to any party without me. But that put me in a situation where I was attending parties that I wasn’t really invited to, and everybody at the party didn’t really know me and I didn’t really know them. Whenever I went to one of these parties, I would constantly be walking up to people trying to talk to them. I was actually quite socially confident, but I didn’t have anything in common with these people and they didn’t really know why I was there and I didn’t really know why I was there. So, those conversations very rarely went anywhere. I eventually put the nail in my coffin by starting to believe that nobody liked me and I wasn’t good at meeting new people. Which made my socializing start to be needy. In reality, it wasn’t that I wasn’t good at meeting new people, it’s just that I was in strange environments that I probably never would have chosen for myself personally. And hanging out with my actor friend felt kind of the same way. I was the friend of the actor, I was the only non-actor in the group, and everybody in the group knew each other intimately well and had for years. And then I was this outsider just tagging along. I was having good conversations with people last night, but when they ended or if they fizzled out or if I felt like I was being fake trying to keep the conversation going, it triggered all those old memories. Of not being the cool kid but trying to fit in in high school. And not the memories as in the memories, just the memories as in similar feelings.