These sort of things really bother me, because they cause me a lot of trouble.<p>I am really uncomfortable in front of people, and no matter how honest I am, I am show my discomfort in interacting with people quite a lot. I look around the room while talking to people, I shuffle around, sometimes I sweat just talking about the weather... I have social anxiety obviously, but it&#x27;s awkward to start a conversation with anyone by saying, &quot;Oh hey, this interaction is going to be really awkward because I have social anxiety.&quot; I tried it for a while and most people seemed to just blow it off.<p>It&#x27;s caused me quite a few issues with friends who frequently think I&#x27;m lying when asked &#x27;truth-seeking questions. More importantly authority figures tend to misinterpret this as me being deceptive or uncooperative.<p>---<p>The most recent example was a police officer that came to my house to see if I had seen my neighbor&#x27;s car recently. The car had been stolen and they were trying to determine the last known time it was present. As usual, during the rather normal questions I was rocking back and forth, chewing on my nails and shuffling my feet. I&#x27;m painfully aware of these things and consciously try to stop each little tick, one by one.<p>It didn&#x27;t take long for the officer to ask why I was so nervous, and the he promptly switched the subject and asked if I had any hobbies. I&#x27;m fairly obsessive about my hobbies, and I pretty much immediately started rambling about what I was doing. I suspect I stopped most of my &#x27;nervous ticks&#x27;, because he interrupted my ramble to ask why I was lying about not having seen the car lately.<p>It was extremely offputting, since I wasn&#x27;t lying. I got really nervous again, and started thinking about how I &#x27;screwed up&#x27; the interaction. Instead of responding to his question I simply told him that I had really bad social anxiety and this questioning was really difficult for me. That didn&#x27;t help at all.<p>I ended up with another officer at my door, with more questions that I had no answers to, and I became more and more nervous. Needless to say this went on for ~30 minutes just standing at my front door until I suppose they realized that I was either telling the truth, or was a completely unreliable witness (I was!).<p>---<p>Things like that aren&#x27;t rare for me. It sucks, and early in my life it caused me to simply lie a lot. People almost always thought I was &#x27;up to something&#x27; or &#x27;not telling the true&#x27;, so I would just go with it. I eventually learned the value of consistent honesty, but I am treated the same regardless.<p>It goes without saying that this being in my head during every single personal encounter causes me even more anxiety and unsuredness about my responses to someone.<p>edit: I noticed I actually started rocking back and forth and itching my head randomly while writing this post... bleh.