Before getting into how the pandemic has affected my one (1) Social Skill (spoiler: it’s not good), I should contextualise my awkwardness with the very real story of my birth: It’s the year 2000. An angry little dumpling is lying in its cot at the hospital. A drunk (or simply unhinged?) fairy godmother stands over the cot and declares A) “this child will possess a single Social Skill on a very good day, when all the stars align”, B) “no matter how much soup this child is told to consume by its parents, it shall never grow.” Blessings do as blessings must: skip forward a few years and you obtain a slightly taller, angrier dumpling which forgets its name when asked by strangers.

“Somewhere between when I started talking to inanimate objects and the 270th attempt at learning crochet, it packed its bags and left”

Over the course of first and second year, the stars align (and by that, I mean I’m forced into very close quarters with others and have to interact with them). The Social Skill, as predicted by the fairy godmother, is tailored to one thing and one thing only: befriend the nearest extrovert and hope they adopt you. It’s what I like to call the “work smart, not hard” scheme, Introvert Edition. When no extrovert can be found, the Social Skill simply does not vibe with working and you can find me hovering near the exit of any gathering, ready to escape at any moment.

Little did second-year-me know that the pandemic would cause my only Social Skill to be the one to make a Great Escape (it’s rude, really; I asked so little of it). Somewhere between when I started talking to inanimate objects and the 270th attempt at learning crochet, it packed its bags and left. Admittedly, it took until the lockdown lifted for me to notice its disappearance.

“I keep talking while I clean my (clean) cutlery. I tell myself it will make me look put-together.”

Subtle signs of the missing Social Skill were present in interactions with less well-known flatmates. Let me paint you a picture: I’m standing in the kitchen making a classic banana, jam and peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, noise-cancelling headphones on, singing very off-key with my back to the door (I hear you asking ‘why??’ and, truly, I wish I could answer). My flatmate walks in. I don’t notice until they are next to me, causing me to jump about two metres in the air. Sometime in the long descent from my jump, I realise I must make small talk. It’s a losing game already, I am mid-sandwich making, there is no plausible escape and no way to conceal either the food or the singing. It is too late. I choose calmly to ask them how they are. Good idea, you say? WRONG. I have not once successfully appeared calm or collected. Failure is not immediate, however. My flatmate kindly mentions neither the singing nor the food as a traumatic event in their life and conversation flows for a moment. The end is in sight: the sandwich is finished! I begin washing up, thinking I may have kept the awkwardness a secret.

I was overly optimistic. They ask me a simple question: How was your day? All the tabs in my brain crash at once. As it reboots, I think ‘good’ and ‘not too bad, thanks’, letting out a strangled: ‘not good, thanks’. It’s a disaster for team social skills. In a last-ditch attempt to make up for this, I keep talking while I clean my (clean) cutlery. I tell myself it will make me look put-together. I dry my hands on the tea towel, open my cupboard. Brain dies again. I shut the cupboard, with the washing up still in my hands. My brain smashes all the command buttons at once. I dry my (dry) hands, open a drawer, put nothing in it, shut it, open the cupboard and finally put my things in it, under the eyes of a truly horrified flatmate. It’s curtains for looking socially competent so I might as well run away.

Why this did not alert me to the disappearance of the Social Skill, I’m not sure. Further major events served to confirm this, including filling an awkward silence by asking porters if it was warm in plodge during a heatwave — with a fan visible behind their heads — and responding with ‘oh, cool’ when they told me that, yes, it was in fact rather warm. Anyways, I’m using this opportunity to ask you to keep an eye out for my Social Skill (very small and easy to miss) and if you spot it, please let me know. Actually, scrap that, I’ll take any stray you can find.