I know this only means so much since I've never even met you IRL, but you are probably far less embarrassing than you believe yourself to be. From everything I've learned, the most important thing in social stuff is often confidence and making people believe you are charismatic by appearing to believe it yourself. People by large are lazy and stupid, and depend on how someone is perceived by themselves and/or others in their peer group to dictate to them how they in turn should feel. I've met people that are as dumb as rocks and somehow even less charismatic (at least from my point of view) that nonetheless manage to be liked simply because they appear to be just THAT convinced that they're hot shit.

I'm not saying all of this because I think you can wave a magic wand and turn yourself into some beloved alpha male, because I know how difficult it is for someone to change their stripes. So far as I know from communicating with you online and reading your work, you're a genuinely intelligent, kind, and witty person, and not a single word that you wrote in this entry honestly makes me believe that I would like you IRL any less.

Honestly, I get people to laugh uproariously at my jokes IRL all the time and I seem to be well-liked, but I am autistic and still have no clue how to make smalltalk and wind up falling apart in normal, non-work related conversations quite often. From everything that I've read, it's not some sort of thing that ANYONE magically acquires, but a skill that everyone has to learn and practice to maintain their knowledge of it, so for most people there is always hope.

For me also, and I suspect for you, it's just difficult to try to connect when one person is a normie who spends their free time doing typical things such as consooming mainstream media, or going out and taking part in normie experiences, or talking about whatever banal things they read on their social media feed... and the other person has deep interests that they get sucked into, to the point where they do not have any common subject matter to fling around. One person is coming into the exchange thinking they're going to be swapping a bunch of little finger foods with each other, while the other brought an entire extra large pizza.

Not to sound narcissistic, but vast majority of what most people talk about IRL just bores me to the point where I personally cannot even see why anyone would want to develop the skillset of conversing with them, but to each their own.

...Also, just in case, I wanted to say that I *DID* respond to your e-mail, and appreciate it very deeply. It seems like at least half of e-mail providers send me to spam because I use Yandex, so I just wanted to let you know through here just in case. (: