Spreading My Wings
Lately, I've been more social than ever before, and now I even have a group of people I consider friends. I've always been shy, introverted, and self-conscious because of my disability. I didn't have many friends in public school, and I was eventually homeschooled because of bullying. I think I'm finally starting to come out of the shell I've been in since 5th grade.
To get the picture of what I'm saying, I've taken that 16personalities MBTI thing and have always hovered around 75-95% introversion, with the lowest percentage (74%) being right before lockdown. I've been socializing more and more over the course of almost a year, and my introversion level has gone down about 20% (93% to 72%) compared to the beginning of 2025.
Anyways, I want to ramble off what I've been doing over this year and my feelings about it.
First, I started watching a few niche goated study with me/productivity youtubers and became a moderator for one Discord server, this is actually where most of my socialization happens, and as the server grows I interact with more people. While it is a study server, there is conversation happening, and it is lowkey interesting how everything flows based on who is talking. Sometimes it's quiet and everyone is working, other times there'll be people yapping and speaking in "brainrot", and other times we talk about what we're working on and share tips and stuff. The server even has a chill VC where people have been streaming video games and goofing off together, which is really cool.
The second thing is a more recent development, but I have a group of like 5-10 people where we have regular-ish hangouts and play online board games, Fortnite zero build, play Minecraft, and chat while doing parallel play. We all like SMOSH, and we even have an Instagram group chat where they send reels, which is a great way to have a nicely curated feed and not doomscroll cuz if I'm bored, I can just watch and respond to the reels they send each other every day.
Even when I do leave the house (rarely, I don't touch grass lol) I don't feel that feeling of shame of looking differently and its freeing, I went my whole childhood worried what I looked like to other people, especially with people my age but I don't care anymore now, I can't change it so the next best thing is to be confident. Although I'm not at the point where I feel like I can confidently interact with others irl, but I will be, and it's one of my goals to do so.
Now, even though I am making great progress, I still have my moments, like for instance, I can interact well enough with others in groups, but having 1-on-1 conversations are scary for some reason, and I struggle responding and keeping up conversations. A smaller issue is interacting with one group and my social battery depletes, so I end up not interacting with other groups, but it feels like I'm exercising my social battery to increase my stamina, if you get the point. I've even been using my mic occasionally on non-study calls with people I'm familiar with, which was another thing I was nervous about.
Besides that, I think I'm starting to understand that humans really are social creatures. When I hang out and interact with friends, I feel so much joy and whimsy, it's crazy. Like I have to calm myself so I don't burst into tears, whatever happiness I thought I was experiencing doesn't compare to the joy after a hangout. I really look forward to them too. I try to have smaller hangouts at least once a week or more and have a big hangout every two weeks. All of this came from just a few of my interests, too.
This is all so amazing to me because I started to feel embarrassed about not being able to socialize, but I'm finally spreading my wings. I would like to put out another post before the end of March, but for now this is an update.
Thanks for reading!