Adult Social Skills

For most of my life, I felt like everyone else had been handed an instruction manual that somehow skipped over me. People seemed to know when to laugh, when to interrupt, when to make eye contact, and when to stop talking. They walked into conversations without rehearsing them first. They didn't spend hours replaying something they said three days ago. I couldn't understand how something that looked so effortless for other people could leave me completely drained.The hardest part wasn't that I disliked people. It was almost the opposite. I wanted friends. I wanted conversations that felt natural. I wanted to walk into a room without immediately wondering where I should stand or whether I looked awkward just existing. Instead, every social situation felt like solving a puzzle while everyone else somehow already knew the answer. I still remember sitting in my car before walking into social events, telling myself I would go inside in just one more minute. Sometimes I spent so long thinking about it that I almost turned around and drove home instead. The hardest part was rarely the conversation itself. It was convincing myself to take those first few steps through the door.“whether I was making too much or too little eye contact. Then, when it was finally over, I replayed everything again, searching for mistakes that other people had probably forgotten within minutes. The strange thing is that most people are far too busy thinking about themselves to spend much time judging us. Realizing that didn't magically erase my anxiety, but it did give me a little breathing room. Maybe the goal wasn't to become perfectly comfortable around people. Maybe the goal was simply to stop believing that every conversation was some kind of test I had to pass.”Excerpt FromFrom Social Anxiety to Real Life: A Short Guide to Reducing Fear and Building Confidence for Men with Autism and Asperger’s SyndromeChaim Bernstein