Long-Distance Calls

6

Later that evening, I thought maybe I had overreacted to what happened on Facebook. Maybe I shouldn't have gotten so mad just because Evelyn Tiger was a sore loser.

Besides, I didn't even really know her. Maybe, I was making the mistake I always watched myself from making. Prejudice. Maybe what I saw on Facebook was just the first impression I got of her.

Sometimes this happened to me. I would brag a lot about how I hate prejudice and first impressions, only to be the first one to immediately judge someone by the way they appeared to me in our first predicament.

But the thing about me is this. Whenever something involving other people happened to me, I would act instinctively, without even asking myself if what I'm doing or saying is right or wrong.

That's due to my social anxiety. Like, a lot of people say they have it, but they probably don't know the first thing about it.

My social anxiety was a state that occurred whenever I was near to someone I didn't know, or had just met, or knew a little but not enough, in which I would feel tense the whole time. I would have my eyes open, like, too open, but they would almost never look in the other's eyes, and I would also have a weird smile on my face. My hands would go all over my body, sweating in the process, and my thoughts would be a mess.

Now, I'm no doctor, so I don't have any fancy word to describe this good, but I can try. Imagine you had a box (my head) containing a lot of great stuff neatly put in there with caution and dedication (my thoughts), and you'd be all careful with that box, 'cause it's perfect the way it is, but then someone (my social anxiety) would come, take that box, and shake the hell out of it.

Not only would it piss you off, but it would also mess up all the neat stuff you had in there.

So, when I found myself in social relations, my head would get shaken and my thoughts would be a mess.

And that resulted in a dangerous lack of social skills, culminating in me saying awkward stuff and people getting a first wrong impression of me.

Engaging in a social relation was, for me, like an oral exam, where you're so tense and you don't know what they might ask you and if you'd know the answer to it, and, sometimes, your mouth would let out stuff that wouldn't even go through the brain first, because, otherwise, you might end up in an awkward silence.

The Internet, though, was different. The Internet was that place where social anxiety disappeared, where you had time to think about what to say, unlike reality. On the Internet, every fool looks cool.

So, the Internet could make me look sharp and sociable, which made it the perfect place for me to engage in a social relationship and actually try to make some friends.

I was, in fact, 90% sure that the new people I was going to meet at school would have gotten a bad first impression of me. The 10% was maintained by the fact that Andrew Hook was going to be there, so people would have seen me having a friend and maybe they would have thought that I could actually be an interesting person.

So, maybe, if I surrounded myself with friends, then they would have thought that I was a cool guy.

I went back on Facebook and before I could even find her name in the chat list, she sent me a message herself. She was actually online on that secondary profile of hers. Something in my head told me that she was waiting for me. Could it be? Was she waiting for me to come back online and make up? Why else would she be online on the secondary profile?