How to Weird People Out when Talking to Them

My extensive experience with social faux pas

During college, I once ate with this girl I hadn’t interacted with before.  She seemed so cool and artsy. She wore nicely-made, well-pressed clothing, the type of clothing that, while not looking ostentatious, probably cost hundreds of dollars. It turns out she studied the humanities and lived in an apartment off-campus in a group house. 

I didn’t know anyone who lived off-campus, and I was curious. I asked if I could see her apartment. Immediately, her face fell. She was super uncomfortable but said yes anyways. 

Then I said, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to!,” and then she said “No, you can totally come over!”. I messed this conversation up, I was realizing, and unless I turned back time and gave myself 50 more EQ points, there was no resurrecting this. 

I’ve always been too intense with people. Get coffee with me, and I’ll tell you about my insecurities, even if I don’t know you well yet. After all, we’ll be besties by tomorrow, right? Pay for Substack, and you’ll get in-depth articulations of emotions that many people might not even know they have. The people I’m closest to accept and love this quality about me, and generally most people feel intrigued if not charmed by my openness, but have enough conversational misses, and you start to doubt yourself deeply.

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Is my disregard of certain social norms a delightful quirk, or am I genuinely causing myself issues? Most days I tell myself that I’m just being qUiRKY and lOVabLe, but then I commit a status faux pas and feel like an idiot.

While this interaction from college has relatively low stakes (believe it or not, I never ended up going to her off-campus apartment or talking to her one-on-one again), there are plenty of higher stakes scenarios out there that I’ve handled poorly. Just put me in a room with a high-status Asian, for instance. 

Probably one of the shame-inducing examples occurred in March 2023. There’s this creator, let’s call her Paula, whose work I’ve liked for years.  Paula was visiting Austin for a few weeks and looking for people to live with. I offered up my apartment, and while she didn’t ultimately accept, we did meet up for coffee, stirring up a bunch of urgency and insecurity for me. 

You see, Paula has amazing marketing savvy, work ethic, and great instincts. Although I don’t follow her work super closely, I’ve known about her work since she had roughly 100 followers. Now she has 200k+, while I “only” have a few thousand, which means that in the grand pecking order of the creator universe, she is morally superior to me. 

Okay, I’m mostly kidding, but therein lies the problem. When I think that people are fundamentally better than me in ways I really care about, I begin to second guess myself and feel like a failure if we don’t immediately click. Paula is so cool and good at life, if I don’t impress her, there must be something wrong with me. I better make sure I’m impressive and edgy and unlike anyone she’s ever met.