Most of my school friends are all over the country, and most of my uni friends are, as well. And you do grow distant if you have separate lifes. Maybe I’ll need to go out of my way more to meet “strange” people, who knows.

I fear I might come across as either arrogant, cold, or creepy.

I’ve been told that in a talk that I perceived as mutually friendly and casual, they wondered why I disliked the other person so much. I guess I am insecure, and it manifests as coldness?

I am physically unimpressive, average height and pretty slender, but I had people recoil when I was mildly angry at them. Looks like angry me has a vibe of “one of us will leave in an ambulance, I don’t care who”. Meh, could be worse, it helped with beggars every now and then.

And for the creepy part… To be fair, I proudly qualify as a pervert, I just aim to be a friendly pervert. Jokes aside, I seem to be in a weird middle ground where people who casually know me think I’m sane, and people who know me well think I’m sane, but somewhere in the middle I guess I must be making too many dark jokes or something.

Sorry for making this all about me, I guess I had to type it out once. Thanks for sharing your experience, maybe I just need to be bolder and give less of a fuck.

🫂

Maybe that was a bad example. Thanks, that is reassuring. However, I feel like I get better and flipping the switch and doing smalltalk / pretending to be social, but worse at actually being social. I fear I’ll end up as a cranky old man yelling at the kids, and I’m not even 30.

Thanks, yeah, that sounds similar. Good for you to have the patience, a different continent (I’m assuming with a language barrier?) must be doing social life on hard mode