This evening I was invited to a 60th birthday/retirement party. I didn’t know many of the people there, since it was a friend’s mother’s party. But this made my invitation all the more flattering.
I’ve started to notice that I’ve perhaps never developed past the stage of looking like a self-consciously awkward teenager whenever I’m in large groups of people. Other humans who aren’t me, make parties look much easier. Or is it all just comparative because I make them look hard? I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s like some folks I don’t know will try to make me feel really welcome. They’ll do things like coming up and talking to me, apropos of nothing; yet I never seem able to instigate anything like that. I just keep myself exclusively in a corner with people my own age, huddled inside the comfort of my familiar social circle. Even at 30, I still don’t feel myself of enough interest to approach someone I don’t really know and make polite conversation. I always feel like I’d need a pretty good reason to do so – perhaps if I needed to alert someone to the fact their child is on fire in the corner, something like that . And even then I’d still be hesitant. The poor kid would be charred to death before I found a polite opportune opening with which to interrupt any conversations their parent’s might be having.
Exactly how am I ever going to get to that position where I can put others at ease with my rapport, when I’m still so pre-occupied by making my rapport feel at ease? Is the skill of looking out for other’s comfort just something which one acquires at a certain age? All my parent’s generation make it look easy – just like how all their parent’s generation made the New Year sing-a-long to “Auld Lang Syne” look easy.
Don’t get me wrong though, I did have a genuinely good time. My self-consciousness is not of such quantity that it actually spoils my enjoyment of parties (let me assure you, that hasn’t happened for at least a year). And neither do I really consider myself aloof. This is nothing more than a small acknowledgement, that maybe I could give a bit more of myself to others, as they do to me. Which is rather ironic, given that I’ve just written a whole entry about someone else’s celebratory occasion and yet have written solely about no-one but my own uninteresting self.
Actually, perhaps that might be the answer? The next time I get invited to a party, I could get all these blogs printed and stapled, then hand them out to guests?
But I suppose if anything, that would be giving an over-compensatory, possibly unnecessary amount of myself to give.
Too much too soon.
Especially if they were merely inviting me to link arms for “High Ho Silver Lining” at the time.
