Background

In this post, I will provide some background info on where I'm coming from here. The idea is that I have a long way to go with this, so if I can do it (btw...I can, and will) you can, too, by following my lead :-)

Allow me to begin by painting a picture. I'm 23 years old, and just finished living on a college campus for six years. The last couple years, I noticed at the end of many typical days, I could count the words that I said throughout the day to other human beings on my 10 fingers. Nope, didn't even need the toes.

So, on a college campus, the best place in the world to meet people... it is pretty shocking to only speak 10 total words in a day of going to class, eating at the dining hall, studying at the library, and walking around. How'd this happen? Not surprisingly, it started in grade school for me. I was extremely shy (we may debate this term later) from about 1st grade, all the way up through high school. On a typical day back then, I'd hardly say anything at all in school. Polar opposite at home around family.

When college started, I made more of a conscious effort, and it wasn't nearly as bad. I'm actually very friendly and love being around other people (how's that for cruel irony). So in college, I made more acquaintances than I could even count, but very few close friends. In fact I have one really good friend that I met at college orientation, but that's it. There were/are other people I would call friends, that I was pretty comfortable with, but I didn't do much or anything with them outside of school work (a very specific issue, which we will tackle in a later post).

So what do I think are the problems...

(1) I've had a hard time being open and generally being myself with most people, family and best friend excluded. It's usually just not comfortable enough.

(2) A severe lack of social interaction experience from grades 1-12, just plain putting me behind. I can't even estimate the number of times I heard the question "How come you never talk?" That should give you an idea of what it was like. Awful.

(3) There's some anxiety stuff going on too. Sometimes.

Now, each of these general problems has many subproblems to be dealt with. The plan is to tackle them ALL in this blog. Well, I am going to tackle them offline, and document what I'm doing here. I am going to make an unbelievably amazing amount of life-changing progress, and I hope there will be some readers in similar situations who will do this with me.