I am not really sure how to say this, so please bear with me.
I am a senior year undergraduate and I must admit that my lack of proper social skill set has been the major reason for my academic and professional life downfall, despite having starting out with great ambitions.
I thought getting bullied and getting discriminated on the basis of my caste would cease after I would join the university because then I would me more among “my people” and they will have greater awareness about such things, but all these past 3 years have ended up doing to me is make my social interaction skill even more worse than ever, the bullying and discrimination didn’t stop either, it just took a more “subtle” new face.
What I really want to point out is that this has led me to develop paranoia I guess because I stopped believing in people at my university most of the time and if someone asks me for favors I doubt that they really care about me beyond the favors, their conversations seem like a chess game — hard to decipher their emotion and intention even if I look at their faces carefully, so as a result of this, I developed slouch, looking down and at this point if some new person comes up with confidence to say anything about something, specially if they are in a group, I start having short breath and my eyes ( a little bit of my nose too) start to water and I really don’t have any control over this anxiety attack.
The bottom line is that I have developed paranoia and get heavy breathing and perspiration upon social interactions as a result of lacking comforting and meaningful “non-transactional” conversations in my three years of university life so far so much so that it has led to me having poor interpersonal skills required for professional life.
I know that not everyone has to click with me and fair enough I have found people online to have good meaningful conversations with, it is just that the way I present myself behind the screen would not get me to far if I were to meet my online friends because of my lack of social skills, and more importantly I think I also need to learn the skill of how to make people immediately around me click with me in real life and not just online.