Everyone Get Extroverted, NOW!
By Stella Speridon-Violet
You’re at a house party your old friend from high school invited you to. You barely know anyone, and that thought alone is sending your eyes straight to the front door and hoping your feet will follow.
But then you see someone with a cool shirt, or maybe cool rings—whatever it may be—and you see them as someone you could get along with. Then you remember you’re completely alone and they’ll probably think you’re some freak, so you don’t say anything.
You stand there for another ten minutes, pretending to be extremely interested in your phone. There’s not really anything to do, so you start putting in numbers on the calculator app, doing anything to look busy enough that nobody realizes you have no idea what you’re doing. And eventually, you leave.
Congratulations! You successfully avoided being embarrassed. You also potentially missed out on meeting someone really cool.
I think this is something Gen Z is particularly bad at: being willing to look stupid.
We are so unbelievably aware of how we are perceived that sometimes it feels like we’re experiencing our own lives from the outside. We’re not just at the party, we’re watching ourselves at the party. We’re thinking about how we look standing alone, whether we’re holding our drink weird, if our outfit looks like we tried too hard, if we should be talking to someone, and, most importantly, whether anyone else has noticed that we’re not talking to anyone.
And it’s made us terrible at talking to strangers.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that approaching someone without a guaranteed positive outcome was embarrassing. That saying hello first was desperate. That double texting was humiliating. That talking to someone at a bar, party, concert, class, or literally anywhere outside of an app was somehow an act of social bravery.
We’ve become obsessed with appearing like we don’t care.
And that’s making us so unbearably boring.
Because the coolest people I know aren’t necessarily the loudest people in the room. They’re the ones who seem completely unafraid to walk up to someone and say, “Hey, I like your shirt.”
They’re not necessarily extroverts. They just aren’t treating every social interaction like a potential career-ending PR crisis.
I think it’s more awkward to stand in the corner and be on your phone than it is to compliment someone at the club.
The worst is people who pay $10-20 for entry into whatever night it is at a bar, or a class, and say nothing. Like, okay? You just wasted your time and your money and are leaving with literally nothing.
The thing is, you don’t even have to be an extrovert. You just have to become a little less afraid of being embarrassed.
Because you are going to be embarrassed.
Image Sourced Through Pinterest
At some point, you will walk up to someone and they won’t want to talk to you. You’ll make a joke that completely dies. You’ll introduce yourself and immediately forget their name. You’ll flirt with someone who absolutely does not flirt back. You’ll misread a situation. You’ll say something awkward and spend the next four hours replaying it in your head like it was the final scene of a psychological thriller.
And then you’ll wake up the next morning and nothing will happen.
You know how many times all of these scenarios have happened to me? Probably a million times throughout my life, but the same things that made me embarrassed made someone else laugh, smile and want to be my friend.
Also, literally nothing will happen.Nobody will make a documentary about the time you awkwardly introduced yourself at a party. In fact, they probably forgot about the interaction five minutes later.
That’s the thing about embarrassment, it feels much bigger to you than it does to everyone else.
Sometimes you have to let yourself be the girl who walks up to the group and says, “How do you guys know each other?”
You have to be willing to start the conversation instead of waiting for someone to decide that you look approachable enough.
And, perhaps most importantly, you have to stop thinking of rejection as humiliation.
Someone not wanting to talk to you doesn't mean there is something wrong with you. It doesn't mean you're annoying, unattractive, boring, or socially inept.
It means they didn't want to talk to you.
That’s it.
We’ve somehow turned rejection into a referendum on our entire personality when it is usually just a matter of circumstance, chemistry, timing, or preference.
Not everyone is going to like you, trust me I know. But, that’s actually great news.
Because once you accept that you cannot be universally liked, you become significantly more free.
You learn to not care about what every single person thinks about you and you learn to not tone yourself down just because you’re scared you’ll be “too much” for a perfect stranger.
Being extroverted doesn’t mean you have a million friends or that you walk into a party and everyone immediately knows your name and sings your song. It just means that you are willing to make your life more interesting, even if it’s just saying hello to someone at the grocery store or asking someone their name.
It means allowing yourself to potentially have a terrible time, because there’s also a chance you’ll have the best night of your life.
Because every person you love was once a stranger. Your best friend was a stranger. Your roommate, a stranger. The person you fell in love with was a stranger.
Every amazing conversation, friendship, relationship, opportunity, and story had to begin somewhere! Usually, it began with someone deciding to be brave for about thirty seconds.
So maybe next time you’re standing alone at a party, and you see someone with cool jewelry, stop thinking about what they might think of you. Walk over and do your best to hold a conversation, even if it freaks you out.
Maybe they’ll think you’re weird or just look you up and down, and maybe you’ll have absolutely nothing in common… or maybe you’ll spend the next three hours talking about music, boys, your mutual hatred of your hometown, and the weird guy in the kitchen who keeps trying to make everyone do shots.
You won’t know until you say hello.
