I was sitting on my front porch thinking about the book I'm writing when a couple girls my age came by walking their dog. As they passed, the dog tried climbing up my porch to me and one of the girls looked at me. I smiled and said "hey." She just stared at me with her mouth open and her eyebrows furrowed like "how dare you."

Now I've got pretty bad social anxiety (the real kind, like from trauma) so it's actually taken me some courage to start being the kind of person to just make eye contact with strangers and say hey, especially girls. I thought if something like this happened I'd be embarrassed and cringe and not forget about it for like a week.

None of that happened. I kind of laughed at her in my head. My anxiety riddled self's internal dialogue was, "What's her problem? She's probably awful to be around." Or maybe I'm reading too much into it, who knows. The takeaway is, I'm actually happy this happened. I'm completely certain her doing this helped me much more than if she smiled and said hey back. Anyways, thanks for reading my small win for the day in terms of improving my foundationally fucked social skills