Apologies for being lame with this.  Too many things came up in a row and I fell out of habit.  Fortunately, I have actual content this time.

So, throughout my endeavour to become more social and grow beyond the shyness that defined me through much of growing up I have only been able to measure my success through my own point of view.  I had to rely on comparing memories to tell if I was actually being more social or if it was just something i’d convinced myself of.  Over the last month though, I’ve found two different instances where my perception of progress was reinforced by other people.

First, a couple weeks ago I was at a concert with a friend.  We got there about an hour before the bands went on, so we had time to waste talking.  After a while, she mentioned reading my blog before and asked about my endeavours of self improvement.  Of course this led to a discussion of how I got on the road I am currently travelling, and she was really surprised as I told her how shy I really was growing up.  She always thought I was a really social person from the day I met her.  Granted, I met her after I was a few months into this experiment and she’s a cute girl, so that may have factored into why I came off as so social.  Either way, I’ve managed to keep up the ‘new me’ and supress the typical shyness I have with people.

Second, in late July I was up visiting family and having breakfast with my aunt and grandma.  After talking for a bit, my aunt made a comment to my grandma which hit me pretty hard.  “He never used to talk.”  It was so true.  Growing up, I always shied away from talking with anyone but my close friends unless pressed.  I never worked to keep conversations going and often just found it to hard to.  But now, I had been having a conversation with family that I’ve never talked to for more than 10 minutes at a time for more than an hour.  Talk about signs of progress.

Now that students are back around campus, it seems like a great time to ramp up the social skydiving.  Practice has been my greatest tool so far.  Might as well push a bit harder than usual while it’s easy to do.