i am so socially awkward

it sounds like social anxiety mixed with something else... please hear me out... perhaps you are autistic? I'm autistic and this is my experience most of the time - social situations are tricky 😭. I recommend searching up "the raads-r test" - it's free to take and can give you a good idea if you're autistic or not.

Lots of people don't like someone suggesting they might be autistic, but I promise there's no harm in looking into it 💜 autism isn't a deficit in social skills or whatever. it's just a difference in the way a brain works, which honestly is a good thing cus people's differences are what makes the world go round.

anyways, have a lil lookie on Google and YouTube and insta and tiktok (actually the tiktok and instagram autism community is weirdly helpful for working out if ur autistic... try @ autinelle on insta)

anywaysss that was a huge tangent. I hope you can find the self help or external help you need. I promise the answer to all of this is understanding yourself and accepting yourself and doing what you want to do in social situations, instead of what you think other people want you to do.

when i'm with my friends i don't shut up, when i'm with one stranger i'm ok but not super confident, but whenever i'm with more than one person i don't know i'm a completely different person..

what's making me write this is that i'm in uni halls right now, and obviously have to walk past reception whenever i want to leave, or even collect post/do laundry. one of the receptionists always says hi to me and i can say hi back but i'm a bit awkward, and he's tried to make conversation with me but i can only give one word answers and i pretend i'm in a rush to get to class or something.

what is really bad though is when the receptionists leave and the security guards turn up. some of them are quiet and nice and i can smile at them, but we have a really young male one who allllll the girls in the halls are in love with lol, so whenever he has a shift which is most nights, there's a load of people hanging out with reception. walking through them all is a nightmare for me. i don't know who to look at, who to smile at etc. and what annoys me is they all go dead silent and stare at me as if they're expecting me to say hi or were just talking about me or something (ik it's 99% likely they weren't but the way they all stop and stare reallyyyy makes it look like it). anyway i just end up looking at them and then looking at the ground and walk off quickly lol.

i don't get why they would all go silent and stare? i'm not imagining it either. maybe they're saying oh there's that awkward girl again lol....

tbf i do think i might be, one of my best friends has autism and we are very similar socially aka socially inept lol, and she says she thinks i stim sometimes i'm not really sure what that means. but whenever i've been to my gp or therapy or anything they say it's just my social anxiety and that's the end of the the conversation...