30 Day Small Talk Challenge with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

I have always hated interacting with people I don't know well and especially hate making small talk. Unfortunately it seems like a part of building social status is by having plenty of social relations. My specific circumstances are as follows: I have generalized anxiety disorder and am introverted (socializing is fatiguing.) I tend to fixate on past failures and repeatedly beat myself over them. For example I still occasionally remember and feel bad (mainly worthless) for a oneitis rejecting me 6 months ago.

I have recently made more efforts to socialize (eg, talking to a cute girl at the library and installing Youtube Revanced for her; that was way out of my comfort zone and made me realize some mistakes, more on that later.)

My motivations for starting this challenge:

• Two of my friends let's call them O and Z made remarks about my awkward social behaviors the former just spontaneously joked about me saying one day I will shoot up the whole college with an AK and the former criticizing me for not responding to someone greeting me (my rationalization is that I don't know the person so why would I greet them but I feel like the real reason is that my anxiety discourages me since I'm afraid I will sound awkward when responding [I don't like the sound of my voice] or I will be seen as pathetic [more on that later]).

• On rare days when I happen to be in the mood to talk with relatively many people, I tend to ruminate less on my past social failures. I believe doing more social interactions dilutes the effect of the bad ones since they become a minority of my experience.

• I think as a part of my GAD I have these delusions of everyone being disappointed in me and seeing me as an underdeveloped failure (i'm underweight, i know i need to fix that and I'm short, that i can't fix feasibly.) When I meet a stranger, especially older or larger males for some reason, my immediate assumption is that they hate me, want to hurt me, or at best, are disappointed in me and see me as immature. I hope that by talking with more people these delusions will go away. I should probably emphasize this point more.

I'm officially starting this challenge today but unintentionally started it a few days ago (with the autistic Revanced Rizz). That experience made me realize that I physically react too strongly (ie, fast, sudden movements, exaggerated facial expressions, voice very out of control [too loud, too quiet, a sense of panic in my voice/stuttering]

Day 1:

• I chatted with girl (super sweet person but not attractive) about her unusual name. What was special about this interaction: I was in a bad mood, my common vulnerable victim mood, that normally paralyzes me preventing me from getting anything done or being interested in ANY social interaction. Yet I forced myself to talk with her and talk about something completely trivial and unimportant. This interaction actually did help pull me out of my bad mood.

• Right after that I went up to my friend O and showed him a picture of an M249 (my fav LMG from a childhood game) and joked about using it instead of an AK since it has a much larger magazine capacity.