Yeah thats me. Actually “inept” would be a lot more accurate, im long past the awkward stage. Or simply “the weird creepy guy”. I don’t know why i put this in the Pit other than the fact that im fucking furious at myself for becoming this way. It wasn’t always like this, i was a normal teenager, if very shy. I used to love going out on weekends, hanging out with friends and getting drunk enough to be able to talk to girls. I was good looking, popular, funny in a witty way and best of all normal. What the hell happened to me? i am a 28 year old living at home, i’ve never been in a real relationship, i haven’t kissed a girl in years. I work the bare minimum to pull my weight, i go outside only when i have no other choice and every several months when i force myself to go out with other people or something important enough happens that i have to go out i am miserable, i just can’t make myself talk to anyone at all and eventually people stopped trying.
I have lived the last ten years in a fog, sitting here on this same chair in front of the same computer talking to people online and falling in love with girls ill never meet. I’m popular with people who will never really know me, im funny as fucking hell on message boards and online games, why can’t i be this way in real life?. I know somewhere deep inside im still the same guy and maybe all he needed was just this last heartbreak to fight his way out. This time i have you won’t fight alone buddy, i’ve held you down for a decade but no longer. Fuck you DigitalC, die and go back to the fucking hell you came from. Welcome back Jorge, i’ve missed you.
“Get some excercise” is probably the best thing you could do. Being fit makes you feel better about yourself, you’ll run into plenty of opportunities to meet people, you’ll have an easy topic of conversation, and you’ll live longer.
Excercise is not just good for the body, it’s good for the mind.
Hey, you should try checking out the community’s recreation catalog, if your town’s got one. Where I live they put out a “Parks and Recreation” listing. You can join all sorts of weird leagues for all sorts of activities (from D&D to waterpolo).
I moved to a new city to start a job and I knew not a soul. I’m not normally an inrovert, but in a town where I didn’t know anybody I was sort of retreating in to “hide me” mode. I picked an activity from the community calendar and started as a newbie. It was a lot of fun and I got used to being social again. I’d go with the guys for a beer afterwards. When I moved back here, I stayed in touch with a couple of them.
Something like that might be a good way for you to learn how to connect with people face-to-face. And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to re-join next year.
(The only experience that wasn’t so great was when I tried a sport that was way too competitive for me.)
Thanks for the advice guys, i’ve already been going to the gym for about a month now with my brother and yes i think its helping a bit and not just with the love handles.
When you do go to the gym, take a group class instead of doing solitary things like weights or the treadmill. Find a class that you like be it aerobics or yoga. Go to the same class every week and you will see a lot of the same people. Now you have something in common with them. You can talk about the class, make fun of the instructor, ask if they go to other classes in the week and like them better and maybe even get a coffee after class.
Ok, good with the exercise. Now get out of the house. Go to the bookstore, pick out some books and find a comfy chair so you can browse. Go to the mall. Go to the park. Go to a museum or historical site. Just go anywhere people are. Talk to someone if you are up to it, but if not, that’s ok, too. Just get out of the house.
Would you be willing to consider talking to a therapist? (Disclaimer: I am a therapist, so I am pretty biased) It sounds like you might have social anxiety disorder, and a therapist should be able to give you some practical advice about how to overcome it. S/he could also give you feedback about your social skills (which I bet are not as bad as you think). You also may want to do some reading on social anxiety. I have heard that a psychologist named Carducci has a good book on practical approaches to shyness.
Why can’t you use your internet experience as “training wheels” for being your real, funny, normal self in real life? Think of the internet as practice for actual interaction, and then apply the same principles (if I’m funny and relatively outgoing, people will like me and think I’m cool, etc.) to daily life?
Your description screams “depression” to me…even if you don’t think so. It’s entirely possible to have major/clinical depression without knowing it, simply because you don’t know any other state of being, or it creeps up on you so slowly you don’t notice a difference.
See a doctor, ask to try anti-depressants, and keep trying different ones until you find one that works for you. I started on Prozac when it first became trendy, but it didn’t do squat for me, so I switched to Wellbutrin and it saved my life.
Social anxiety and depression both sound like likely possibilities. Is it possible to get over that without meds or therapy? I figured i would just you know, get myself out of the hole since i got myself in it. Thank you for all the encouragement so far, and all the good ideas, i will try some of them for sure.
Well in my defense it was originally going to be a pitting about someone who lied and cheated and tossed me aside the moment something “real” came along, but it came out a lot different than i intended. Maybe its for the best!
What do you have against meds and therapy? If the “hole” is due to brain chemistry, you didn’t get yourself into it, and therefore can’t just will yourself out of it. It’s a medical condition, and as such can (and should) be treated like one.
Now that that’s done, great job on realizing you want to change your life, DigitalC. Going to the gym is a fantastic start, definitely keep it up. If you can, try to pair it with an organized sport of some kind. Even if you suck at first, you’ll get better and it’s a fun way to both exercise and interact with people.
What’s your job/money situation? If you can afford it, you might try changing your wardrobe and/or going to a trendy hair place for a cool haircut. You don’t have to know what you want – just show up and tell the people you’re trying to make a change and ask their opinions. And updating your look will both give you more confidence and help you break with your past reclusive self, making it easier to try new things and meet people.
It’s cool – this is one of those moves based more on the direction I expect the thread to take than the passion of the OP. Please don’t take the move as a rebuke in any way.
Sounds exactly like me when I was twenty-eight. Living at home, no social life, no romantic life, no real job, devastatingly out of shape, just sitting around playing video games all day and not accomplishing anything. And yeah, like licentious suggested, depressed as hell and not realizing it because I’d been that way for so long. Three years later, I’ve got my own place, I started jogging and am in the best shape of my life, I’ve found a career I want to follow (working in the video game industry) I’ve been in a long-term relationship (lasted almost two years, and we’re still very good friends) and I’ve got an active social life (relative to my previous life as a shut-in, anyway). Luckily, my depression wasn’t chemical, just a result of being lonely and deeply dissatisfied with my life, so when I changed my life, my depression went away on its own. You might not be so lucky, though. You do sound depressed, and just getting some exercise might not be enough to fix it. The most important thing to remember is, don’t be afraid to ask for help, professional or otherwise. The one great regret I have about my twenties is that I didn’t try to get help, and tried to fix my life all by myself. And consequently, I missed out on the better part of a decade of my life. I was always telling myself that my problems weren’t important enough to bother with a therapist. Which, in hindsight, was so exquistily stupid I can barely breath. If I’d gotten help - professional help - when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, when I first started realizing how deeply unsatisfied I was with my life, I wouldn’t have wasted the next five years in a depressive funk, trying and failing to break years of ingrained negative habits. I did it, eventually, but it was way more work than it needed to be.
And hey, don’t knock the internet. If you can be funny and charming online, make that work for you. Try an online dating service, get to know people online where you can make a better first impression and get to know them a bit before meeting them in person, so you don’t feel so awkward around them.
Thanks for that Miller, its good to know someone in almost my exact situation managed to pull through. Im a bit hesitant to jump in directly into meds and therapy without at least giving myself a shot to pull out of this funk.
I’ve also let that dissatisfied funk creep up into long term depression too many times. It sucks . That said, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice trying to “give yourself a shot to pull out of this”. You don’t get any brownie points for fighting depression on your own, particularly since that’s not a terribly effective way to fight it.
There are good reasons to think carefully before committing to medication, since all medications have potential side effects, but what could it possibly harm to go get some couselling?* At worst, a competent therapist will tell you that you’re in a fairly normal place that many people go through, and maybe recommend some coping skills and talk with you about achieving life goals. If more treatment is warranted, then it will be even more useful! And don’t think for a minute that going to a therapist is backing out of dealing with your own problems - therapy IS dealing with your problems.
mischievous
*okay, there are a few horror stories about therapists who exist only to get their clients increasingly emotionally dependent on them, but I’m assuming that DigitalC is capable of recognizing a scam when he sees one.
Mostly its a monetary issue. Ive barely worked for the last few years since i had almost no expenses and nothing to save for that i cared about. I’m already looking for a better job but i have a lot of other things i will need to spend it on to afford meds or therapy so i’d like to avoid it if at all possible. Maybe im just making excuses, i don’t know.
. That said, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice trying to “give yourself a shot to pull out of this”. You don’t get any brownie points for fighting depression on your own, particularly since that’s not a terribly effective way to fight it.