‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
-Abraham Lincoln

The next personality-trait change?
This one is still related to confidence, but I would really like to not feel stupid after I talk.
I constantly expect that I’m going to say something dumb or offensive, and then people will think I’m a horrible person. Which will be true.
But you can’t not talk. The person at the party who sits in the corner and says nothing: creepy. He’s not going to make any friends. He’s not going to impress any girls. He will die alone. Unmourned. And unloved. We’ll call that Plan B.
An example: I have a gift certificate for Ric’s Grill. There was a girl in my running group that seemed nice. So I asked if she would like to join me and help me use it. I tried to make it a low pressure request. I don’t think I did anything wrong. But for the next week I felt as if I had said something bad. As near as I can tell, there was no basis for this.
That is what I want to stop: The anticipation that everything I say will be wrong. A corollary of this is that I start having my own opinion instead of changing mine to match the one of the last person I talked to.

The fact that the girl in question said we should make plans after the marathon and that that was the last I’ve seen of her shouldn’t be relevant to this discussion.

That certificate expires soon. I better use it.