PART 2: At 28, I Taught Myself How to Be Likable. Here's How I Did It

More specific tips on how to appear normal when you have a weird brain

If you missed Part 1, here it is! I’m shocked and excited at how much attention it got; clearly I’m not the only one who struggled with social cues well into adulthood. Let’s all be friends.

Part 1 TLDR: I’ve always been socially awkward (in an extroverted, self-centered, talkative way, not a shy/quiet way) and in my late twenties, after being routinely excluded at a workplace where most of the colleagues were friends outside of work, I realized it was up to me to change my behavior. The tips covered in Part 1 were:

1. Ask people more questions about themselves and limit talking about yourself, but make sure to give full answers to questions that further the conversation instead of one-word answers that halt the conversation.

2. Act like you care more than you do about what other people say; also understand that other people who talk to you are probably abiding by the same rule. Assume they care 50% less than how they’re acting.

   1. This is an area where I want to clear up something for which I got some heat on Twitter. I’m not saying “nobody cares,” or that I don’t care about other people, only that something you find fascinating will likely not be just as interesting to everyone you meet, unless you are in some kind of shared hobby environment and maybe not even then. I used to play The Sims a lot, and even if I met someone who also liked The Sims, I wouldn’t expect that person to care about my ten-generation Sims legacy, all the characters’ names and jobs and twists and turns, as much as I did. I’m not telling you to “pretend to care” about other people’s lives with the assumption that everyone’s going to be boring. I’m saying that especially among women, there is a social contract that requires you to show about 50% more enthusiasm than however you actually feel.

   2. Some people argued that this wasn’t accurate because they care just as much about other people’s hobbies as their own. I mean, I guess, but I think these people are also lying. You might care about others’ hobbies, you might even find them fascinating, but there’s no way you care equally about every single person’s hobbies as you do your own. I’m sorry, I’m not buying it!

3. If someone doesn’t know about something you’re talking about, they probably don’t want to be educated on it or lectured on it, and they’re not going to explicitly tell you that. When in doubt, err on the side of not lecturing.

   1. Someone on Twitter said they had success by asking people if they wanted the short, medium or long explanation. I like this idea, but note that very few people will say “short” because it comes off as rude. So assume medium actually means short.

4. Every conversation has merit, even with people you’ll never see again. Practice social skills on everyone you talk to, even if no relationship will come of it.

Okay, all caught up? Let’s get into Part 2! This section will cover more specific do’s and don’ts, from self-deprecating humor to getting someone’s contact information. This is also not the end—I will publish Part 3, which will get into how to behave with people who you have already gotten to know, to keep those connections going.

1.) Have compassion for yourself and others.

Before you roll your eyes at me, this is practical advice, not feel-good Mr. Rogers stuff.

When I was at my worst socially, I realized that my mindset oscillated between two inaccurate realities:

1. I suck, I’m inherently unlikable and unworthy, nobody will ever like me because I suck and nothing I do will help. After all—I have a thirty-year track record of nobody liking me. What are the odds I could turn it around now?

2. Everyone is just jealous of me, or intimidated by me. Other people are boring and lame and if they don’t like me, I don’t like them either, screw them. I’m hilarious, if people don’t like my jokes then they wouldn’t be good friends anyway. They’re also assholes for not liking me.

What helped me were two things:

1. Thinking about people I had rejected. Just because I wanted friends didn’t mean I had zero standards for friends, and I realized there were people I didn’t want to befriend, who weren’t inherently bad or unworthy. We just had no chemistry. Sometimes they weren’t even socially awkward! We just had vastly different interests and personalities to the point that we didn’t click. I’m thinking of one girl in particular who was very interested in being a startup CEO, but her interest seemed mostly around “being a CEO” and less around any particular business idea. Hanging out with her—which I did a couple times—always felt like she was trying to do some kind of “women in tech” workshop. I just wasn’t feeling it (and I don’t think she was either.) Keep in mind, she had lots of friends—tons of people liked this aspect of her! But it wasn’t for me.

   1. I’m not a bad person for rejecting someone, and therefore, nobody is a bad person for rejecting me. It’s not mean to not want to be friends with someone. It’s mean to bully someone or exclude them in a wholly unnecessary way (I’d say my coworkers scheduling team outings without me was a bit much!) but simply not responding to someone’s texts or not wanting to meet up isn’t “mean.” It doesn’t make that person an asshole. It means you didn’t click. Move on.

2. Realizing that social skills are just that—a skill. Nobody is inherently unworthy. If your personality is a bit off-putting, it’s not because you are off-putting, it’s because you haven’t figured out the tools to introduce your personality to people. Someone is not a bad person or unworthy for not knowing how to play soccer, and no coach is a bad person for not wanting someone on their team who has never played soccer before. It’s just…if they want to get good at soccer, they’ll have to practice.

2.) This is not an audition.

In my family, growing up, being funny was the most important trait you could have. Both of my parents were very funny. They even had a rule that if I got in trouble at school for something funny, they wouldn’t be mad (they made good on this when I got in trouble for convincing my first grade class that our sadistic gym teacher was an alien in a humanoid skin suit.) Dinner routinely felt like a Comedy Central Roast (without the insults) where everyone was just making jokes at each other. It was really difficult to come out of this environment—where you could never try too hard to be funny—and enter the real world, where most people do not value humor nearly as much as my family did, and also aren’t that funny themselves.

That’s not me putting other people down, by the way. Being funny is great but it’s not the most important thing in the world, and it’s subjective (many folks on Twitter would be eager to remind me that I’m not, in fact, funny at all.) But when I entered the real world of socialization, I thought it was my duty to be as funny and interesting as possible to make people like me. And interestingly, this tended to have the opposite effect.

Here’s an example of how I failed at this—and it’s a really embarrassing example.