How to Survive Intense Social Awkwardness

I was awkward. For years. All the formative ones. I probably still am, but not in a way that matters, not in a way that impedes me from doing anything I really want to do. I still hate making phone calls, but the millennials have made this affliction of mine socially respectable. God forbid I am ever forced to look at the dating market again, but I suspect, at this point — between my maintenance of myself and my capacity to actually enjoy grown-ass women — I’d probably do a lot better than I did a quarter-century ago. (It would be more of a question of motivation: why would I ever want to go through the effort of explaining myself all over again to someone who isn’t Ashley?) I am happily married, friends with people who I am proud to know, and employed in a way that won’t vanish for at least six months. I have, at this point, probably survived the worst that social awkwardness could do to me.

And social awkwardness really did its worst. I don’t have any really aesthetically or intellectually interesting anecdotes to put here — the misery of adolescence is one of the territories of human experience that American artists and writers have, frankly, too thoroughly mined. I could share some banal stories,¹ but awkwardness is a structure — many little stories, not one big one. What it leaves you with is a sense that you are by nature unqualified for dealing with other people, that everything you do in a social situation is already wrong before you do it, or is made wrong by your deciding to do it. At its worst, this can leave you with a haunting suspicion, often sharpening into an overwhelming certainty, that you will never really be loved or even appreciated. You watch Edward Scissorhands and think, flatly, without even the sense of discovering something, “That will be my fate, except I will never kiss Winona Ryder.” Thoughts like this, repeated daily, hourly, over time, can actually kill a person.