To approach or to be approached? 

I’m no stranger to unintentional self-sabotaging, but I think one of my most detrimental habits is being a “wallflower.” I specifically put myself in situations to be social, but would feel out of place amidst so much conversation happening without me that I would resort to going on my phone to look busy. Then afterwards I would feel defeated and wonder why no one talked to me. 

There’s a lot of implicit assumptions we make, but one of the ones I made is that people will approach me simply because I’m there. And then when they didn’t, I wondered if it’s because I was having a bad hair day, or my outfit was ugly, or maybe I’m not pretty enough. But who actually makes friends based on appearances? 

I kept expecting that things would happen the way they do at the beginning of college—you jump straight from strangers to friends, skipping the stage of being acquaintances. But as an adult, this becomes increasingly less realistic. You need acquaintances to make friends. You need to talk to people so they remember who you are. 

It quickly became second-nature for me to sit in the background, silently judging everyone. I thought that I wouldn’t fit in with them, so it was an unconscious defense mechanism to rule them out before giving them a chance—to feel dejected on my own terms. I started having thoughts like “this person looks so cool, they would never wanna be my friend,” even without realizing I was assuming the other person was as shallow as I was proving myself to be. 

Somewhere along the way, I forgot what kind of person I want to be. I know that I love talking, and making friends, and giving compliments. So how did I become this? What’s stopping me from being the person that I look up to? It sounds silly to say that I’m shy, because that feels like something that only kids are allowed to be—something you’re supposed to grow out of. 

If you’ve ever been considered a ‘quiet person’ before, you’ve probably also had people assume that you’re mean. I don’t know who came up with this, but it’s not like I can be mad because my assumptions about others weren’t much better. When you don’t know someone, it’s easy to use the information that you have to fill in the blanks. So what if you only see them across a classroom or on social media? I’m sure you still think something about them. We can’t help it. 

Sometimes judgments are automatic, and we don’t even realize. We just have this gut feeling when we see them, some call it intuition, and maybe sometimes we’re right. But also what if we’re wrong? 

We can’t stop ourselves from forming heuristics, but we can stop ourselves from letting them influence our behavior. In my case, I shouldn’t let my assumptions about people deter me from approaching them.

A couple weeks ago, I went to a club meeting after going back and forth about whether I had the energy to leave my apartment. When I got there, everyone was talking amongst themselves and the girl sitting next to me also wasn’t talking to anyone, so I turned to her and, without even taking one deciding glance at her first, said, “Everyone else is talking and I feel awkward,” and that’s all it took. It was that easy. She laughed like I was making a joke (I wasn’t) and then we talked the rest of the meeting. 

When you don’t feel the greatest about yourself, and you’re living in the same world as the rest of us, it’s easy to think the worst of others. But what if you gave everyone the benefit of the doubt? 

It felt weirdly self-deprecating to view myself as a shy person, like I don’t have the confidence or courage to hold my own in a conversation, so I decided to stop seeing myself that way. When I see myself as an equal with the people I admire, it makes me admire myself. 

Sure, I can’t magically change my entire personality and become an extrovert, and there will be days when I’m tired and my social battery has run out and I feel like keeping to myself, but reframing my mindset has opened so many doors for me.