It's almost that time of year for our yearly neighbours christmas meal out. Last year was a bit of a disaster, here's a quote from last years blog post about it :
"About a week ago my family went to dinner with our neighbours; its a yearly tradition that we all meet and go to pizza express around Christmas time. My younger sister is on a gap year at the moment and is working with three others her age who were also at the dinner. So the majority of the time, the conversation was limited to the four of them talking about work, which I couldn’t really contribute to. Though even when something came up that I could have talked about I still didn’t speak up much. The only time I really spoke was when asked about my dietary habits - I’ve been vegan now for about 9 months, so I was quizzed about that for a few minutes after ordering my cheese free pizza. I hadn’t been around that many people for a while and found the whole thing pretty overwhelming."
And my private diary entry :
"Went out to dinner last night w/ old neighbours: did not go well. lots of ANTS (mainly about appearance)
- "my hair is a mess"
- "my skin is awful"
- "I'm fat"
- "I have nothing in common with anyone here."
- "they all think I'm strange"."
It's tomorrow night and I'm not too anxious about it at the moment. My anticipatory anxiety has gone down a fair amount in the last few months, but I'm still very awkward and shy when actually talking to people but I suppose that just takes practice.
I can remember vividly sitting there last year with this big group of people feeling SO out of place and like everyone was thinking bad things of me and feeling very self conscious. I think I uttered less than a hundred words the whole night. I'm desperate for this year to be better ... it should do because I have made progress (even though I sometimes don't believe it).
We also have our yearly christmas eve drinks party at our house. There's going to be about 30 - 35 people there. In a way I'm looking forward to that. I find that sort of thing a lot less stressful because I can move about the room and talk to more people for a shorter amount of time rather than sitting next to the same person all night stuck for something to say.
Hello Melanie - found your blog through another and am glad that I have. How did the meal out go? I am hoping it went as you hoped it would.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to following along ... your design is lovely by the way :0)
Wow, we think so much alike. I'm bad with ANTS as well, I get very self defeating when around people I don't know or too many people....
ReplyDeleteI hope it went well :)
Hi Amanda, thanks for the comment. It went marginally better than last year but still not great. All in all I feel like I've taken a big step backwards SA wise. I'll write a post about it another time when it isn't midnight and I don't have to get up for work in a few hours!
ReplyDelete