I’ve realised recently that I had a goal or an expectation
Maybe a wish or a dream…
That all the healing work I’ve been doing was going to magically fix me. Somewhere inside I believed that all the energy I’ve been using for most of my life to keep uncomfortable feelings at bay would be freed up, and leave me as a vibrant person who no longer feels depleted all the time.
I thought I would stop feeling anxious because I wouldn’t have those old feelings swimming around my body any more, and that would free me up to become socially confident.
So it’s been a real blow to realise that being easily overwhelmed and depleted, and generally socially awkward, are pretty much stable parts of my personality.
Part of me feels super excited about getting to know my actual self
Now I can learn how to live in alignment with who I am. But there’s another part of me that desperately wants to be “normal” – anything other than awkward. And that part is causing a fog of anxiety at the moment.
I’ve been working hard on learning how to look after myself so that I don’t always feel depleted. I’ve found it frustrating to realise just how much time I need to invest in looking after myself, especially coming to terms with how little time I have left after looking after myself and my family to work on personal projects. But now I understand why, I feel less shame about it. That’s made it easier to face up to and work on.
It feels pretty obvious at this point that I’m always going to be some level of awkward, especially in any situation with a group of people. And that feels much more shameful and harder to accept. So, how do I learn to love the awkward?
What does awkward even mean?
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary: “lacking social grace and assurance”
Cambridge dictionary: “embarrassed or nervous”
Etymonline: “embarrassed, ill-at-ease”
Yep, I guess those all fit me a lot of the time!
I love how even the word awkward looks awkward—all those Ws and Ks next to each other.
“Just be more confident” – ?
I spent the first 10 years of my career working for a large professional services firm as an auditor. My feedback consistently for pretty much the whole 10 years I worked there boiled down to: “be more confident”. Um. How do I do that exactly?
Looking back I think what it actually meant was “be less anxious and awkward”.
Which maybe translated to “be less overwhelmed and awkward”.
OK – so I’m working on being less overwhelmed
And now I understand *why* I can be socially awkward I have a lot less shame about it. Which actually takes away some of my anxiety and awkwardness.
Small talk is a skill you can learn – ?
Alongside my autism assessment I took a test to assess how much I was camouflaging my autistic traits.
I scored high overall, but I was notably lower in one category: Compensation. Which refers to “how much we copy other people and display learned social behaviours”. For example consciously using phrases you’ve heard other people use, or seen on TV.
My immediate thought on reading many of the compensation questions was “that would have been a really good idea!”. In practice my mask mostly took the form of silence and making myself invisible. So now I’m playing with how I can be a little more intentional with figuring out the whole small-talk thing!
I feel like this is going to be a lifetime’s work, but here I go!