What's up seddit.

You know how sometimes you walk on the street and the words just flow out of your mouth uncontrollably. You don't even notice that you just opened these girls or this partying group, because you're cracking joke after joke and everybody seems to hang on your every word. You feel really awesome in your skin and wonder why you ever felt bad about yourself.

Then there's days where you stutter talking to people, weird things come out of your mouth that lack any logical connection and people sometimes even fail to recognize that you just said something. Your body language looks less confident than usually and the timing of your jokes and interjections is just off.

Well, today was a day of the latter kind.

I saw two pretty girls sitting in the cafeteria, and immediately I had a feeling that this is going to be ugly. Moments before I had inhaled a huge burger and mentally I was in a place far from flirting with hot strangers. My thoughts formed circles that span faster and faster, until any clear image was blurred behind a feverish haze. I stared at the palms of my hands, trying to get into a meditative state, then walked over and opened with some stupid line.

And, it was ugly. I didn't get hurt, I still have all my limbs, but a chill conversation it was not. Everything I said felt forced and I didn't show any intent that went beyond letting bullshit pour out of my mouth. In the end I didn't ask for her number, just because I was too nervous and I felt that the interaction "was not good enough".

Normally, on a day like this, I would've given up and taken the next bus home before any more "damage" could be done. I've always felt that there'd be no use in talking to anyone when neither me nor them would have fun with it. Today I just kept going, no matter how weird it'd get. I had some more conversations with people on campus, some strangers and some friends. Again, nothing fruitful evolved, but I spent at least another hour socializing and in the end, I felt relieved.

Just now when I came home I realized that today was a really important day in actuality. While up until now, on days like this I've just crawled home and thought sad things until I felt better the next day or next week, today I kept fighting. And in the end I came tiny bits closer to being my awesome self again. My mind was still going in weird places most of the time, but because from the outside I was socializing a lot, I forced my brain to think that maybe today wasn't so bad at all. What helped me was knowing that almost nobody has the courage to talk to strangers anyway, so I can only win by doing it.

The mistake I used to make was trying to hide my weird self that comes out when I don't feel on point. While hiding behind the safe walls of my house was always comfortable, it only made me feel better very slowly. And to be quite honest: there have been way too many of days like this in the past to justify this behavior.

Now I sit here typing, and I feel like an awesome human being again. It did take some time to turn this day around, but now I learned that we have more control over our perception of reality than we think.

My guess is that you had experiences like this before and I hope this helps.