I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at socializing in large groups.

I know, right? On Saturday night, I told Lee Ann and Karen that I was not a very social person and they laughed at me. Serious, audible laughter directed towards me. But it’s true. Now, this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Exceptions can be made depending on the people in aforementioned large group. But the majority of the time, one will find this trait to be rather consistent.

Since I started reading twentysomething blogs about a year ago, I have been reading a lot about how people are striving to be their true, authentic self. It’s a fascinating concept that I have always struggled with because I have never been very satisfied with who I am. I have never been satisfied with my appearance, my relationships, my finances or my intelligence. It’s been a constant struggle to grow and improve, but that’s how adolescence often is. It’s messy and uncomfortable and it lasts much, much longer than you expect.

One part of being authentic and learning to appreciate who I am was to realize that I am no good in large groups, especially not large groups of people I don’t know well. Even in college, when I would hang out with the kids from my youth group or if I would hang out with the kids at the coffeeshop, if the crowd became too big, I would slowly but surely lose my confidence to speak. It was a strange sensation because independently, I had fine conversations with each of them. But the pressure to compete with other people was too strong, and I would slowly lose the motivation to share my thoughts. So to those who doubt, let me say this: being an introvert does not preclude you from being a meet-up organizer, and being a meet-up organizer does not preclude you from occasionally staring at the wall like it has a Picasso hanging on it.

It was difficult to figure out why it happened, and part of my therapy when I was in college was actually to figure out why I did it. And then I figured out something: it’s okay to be uncomfortable and overwhelmed in groups of more than three people! There isn’t anything wrong with me!

What I did discover was I also liked to connect people with others. It’s why I have a passion for diabetes meet-ups. I like to take people with diabetes and introduce them to each other and see the flurry of excitement and experiences and ideas. The odds of success in mixing and matching people with diabetes increases with the more people you have, so I love to have as large of a group as possible. When I arrive at a meet-up, I put on my Hostess hat. It’s almost like I’m acting. The role of Hostess requires it of me, so I often appear to be a take-charge leader because it’s expected of me. People expect me to speak, and so disappearing isn’t an option.

But it isn’t natural.

My natural state is when I’m at a meet-up that other people host. When I enter a room, I try to psych myself up. I am going to be outgoing and entertaining and I’m going to have a lot of really funny things to say. But it never happens. I walk in and I see people mixing and mingling together and I have absolutely no idea what to say. Nothing. I clam up. I hover like the dorky kid in middle school waiting for the popular girls to notice her. I wait for someone to approach me. Once I’ve been approached, I’m usually fine. I can carry on a conversation with the best of them. When I am in a group of people at a restaurant or sitting around a living room, twenty or thirty minutes can go by before I say something.

My biggest fear is that I’m going to be boring. That I am going to ask someone a stupid question or make a dumb comment, and I will get a one word answer or some off-hand remark and they’ll leave thinking, “Wow, what a weird girl.” Being a nervous wreck during these conversations usually leads me to infer tonality in people’s voices where there is none. I’ll think someone is miffed or bored, when in reality, they are answering the question perfectly normal and what I really need is for someone to stand next to me and go, “Would you chill the eff out?”

Me? Wound a little tight? You don’t say…

Sometimes I try to go to meet-ups or happy hours and all I think while I’m there is that if I could just get one of these girls alone at a coffeeshop where we can just talk like normal people, then I would come off as relatively normal. And that’s what I’ve discovered is my true authentic self in socializing. I know that if you get me in a group, especially if they are people who I am meeting for the first time or who I don’t know well, I am going to have a really difficult time being comfortable.

So if you meet me at a party or meet-up that I’m organizing, just realize that it’s actually taking a lot of courage and strength to coordinate people and that if you actually found me at a happy hour or a tweet up (which, if I actually acknowledged my true self, you would never, ever find me at), you might find a very different girl, but they are actually the same person. The true, authentic Allison can usually be found at hanging out by herself at a cafe, pouring over one of the many unread books she has collecting on her bookshelf, waiting to talk to someone about politics or religion or whether or not the top kept spinning at the end of the movie.