Sweating the Small Talk

I'm not really good at small talk with strangers, hell, with people I know too. I don't know what it is, but I hate it. It's the worse with strangers. At my day job, I have to talk with strangers all the time. I just want to get them what they need and out of my life. Is that too harsh? I mean, I don't want to have a conversation about the weather, and I don't care that you have a daughter named Kelly. It's not like it's an uncommon name. If my name was Princess Unicorn, and so was your daughter's then yes, that is a weird coincidence. let's talk about it. I don't know how to respond to that. Does that make me a bad person? Well, not a bad person, but a bitch? I don't mean to be a bitch, but I just don't think I should have to feign interest in a pointless conversation with someone I'll never see again. Perhaps I wasn't taught as a child how to interact with people. I was taught to fear strangers, as they can take you right out of your own backyard. Remember that Polly Class girl? I remember I was about her age when it happened and it freaked my mom out- well it should have freaked any parent out actually. But my mom maybe went overboard with the fear. The thing was, it was really unlikely I would be kidnapped from our backyard. It was a shitty backyard and we lived on a hill. We had a deck and a bunch of random plants growing underneath it like a jungle that no animal would want live in, and that no big corporation would want to tear down for profits.

Oh I've done it again, I've rambled on and astray from my point. I suppose that point was, that I was raised to fear people, rather than to embrace them.

I think that adulthood is about figuring out how exactly childhood/adolescence messed you up, and then trying to correct it. I know that when I was young I felt fat and ugly, and I feared strangers, and I just wanted people to think that I was amazing. Now that I know all of those things made up my crazy mind today, I need to figure out how to undo that frame of mind. I'd like to be that person at a bar that can start a conversation with someone and then meet a cool new friend. I'm just so self-conscious about how I appear to them, and am so worried I'll say something wrong. I've always been so eager to be liked by people that I don't know how to just be myself at first meeting. I get tense and shy. I'm sure that most of my first impressions were awful. So how do I fix this? Perhaps it's time for therapy...again.