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Do you come across as shy?

I used to be VERY shy. Then i started taking risks and figuring out how people reacted to my behaviour. These days I've started taking ownership of my awkwardness. I still go between overly shy and inappropriately open/ honest, etc... but by acknowledging the inherent awkwardness of my behaviour and pointing it out (usually via self-deprecating humour), the social stuff seems to work out a lot better.
 
I am very shy. It's something I am trying to change, but I've had little success so far. I'm known as the quiet person. :/
 
I was talking to my youngest brother a couple of weeks ago when he was staying with my family. Not that he is all that young, turning 40 soon.

The thing is that he is not shy and does not come across as shy or even awkward. His social skills were poor throughout most of his life (like myself he got a lot better from his mid 30s onwards) but he came across as more annoying than anything else. He had a tendency to do things that people found creepy, like invading their "space" without realizing it, or following them around (his friends at one stage nicknamed him "shadow", but never told him the real reason why).

And yet I would say that he is an aspie for sure, he has all the traits and some very obvious comorbids (executive dysfunction to a shocking extent), and his IQ is off the scale. He also has the worst short term memory imagineable, but an extremely good long term memory. So not all aspies are socially awkward, not all come across as shy, there are exceptions.
 
I worked with a guy a number of years back. He wasn't shy, he would ask pregnant women about the sensitivity of their nipples, he would ask newly married women what sort of bed they slept in and how often they had relations with their husbands. He would just drop things in conversations that made you go :shocked:. A nice guy, I liked him and considered him a friend, but I had to drag him away from some conversations where he was offending women without even realizing it. And the funny thing was that he was pretty much asexual, he clearly liked women and he'd had girlfriends who he was sexually active with, but he was open about the fact that he didn't enjoy sex and that he didn't want a girlfriend purely for the reason that she would expect to be physically intimate with him. And he had some bizarre obsessions. But he was very rational and smart. Most likely another aspie who didn't fit the stereotype of being socially withdrawn. He was certainly socially awkward, but he had no idea that he was.
 
I've always come across as shy, and sometimes I think I come across as rude or ignorant, even though I don't mean to be. I'm making more of an effort to talk to people now and I will speak when spoken to but I still have this fear of embarrassing myself and giving someone the opportunity to make fun of me, and it makes me feel like I was asking for it. I used to get that quite a lot at school and it made me wary of trying to talk to people my own age, so I just kept my mouth shut. I was known as the quiet one pretty much all the way through secondary school.
 
I am shy and people don't always believe it. Perhaps I should start asking them " how do you think shy people act?"

I get so shy I get nervous and can't get a word out.
 
I am shy and people don't always believe it. Perhaps I should start asking them " how do you think shy people act?"

I get so shy I get nervous and can't get a word out.

Could be a good idea to ask that question, I'm still kinda like that when I'm in a crowded place but mainly when I used to really like a person. :lol2:
 

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