Deana was accepted into Midwestern State University, the same college where Beverly teaches, in Wichita Falls. At first, she selected nursing as her major, thinking it would be a fast path to financial independence.

But almost as quickly, she realized that despite her love of metal music, blood and needles weren’t for her. She switched to business. One of the first required classes was on psychology, and before long, Deana was in love. The behaviors she found inexplicable about her neighbors—the stereotyping, the prying—all started to make sense. She learned about bias, social exclusion, collectivism, and individualism. She saw how those concepts applied to the very different cultures of the former U.S.S.R. and Texas. She understood how it’s often the case that the root of prejudice is fear.whic

Deana, like Daniel, had found a way to intellectualize her experiences. And as occurred for Daniel, her experiences seemed less hurtful when projected through a less personal lens.

That’s when things started to change for Deana. She understood Texans better, so she stopped expecting Texans to behave differently. Gradually, Texan culture, though no less distinctive, was no longer as freakish to her.

My own social anxiety was far less rational than Deana’s—by second grade, I spoke English just as well as my native-born classmates. Still, it’s been equally severe at times. I once skipped a fifth-grade class field trip because I knew it would involve unstructured time without teachers, and I was worried about navigating the social free-for-all. The summer after I graduated high school, I almost had a panic attack when I realized college would involve attending lots of parties, which I imagined as nightmarish gauntlets filled with subtle social cues and unspoken expectations. (I had failed to factor in alcohol, anxiety’s great equalizer.)

But becoming an observer of people, just like Deana and Daniel did, helped me get through the social interactions of my young adulthood. I had always been interested in people and current events, but one reason I took up journalism in high school is that I knew it would force me, a painfully shy brooder, out of my comfort zone. For my high school paper, I interviewed a TV producer and a girl who had struggled with anorexia. Interviewing people not only lessened my unease around strangers, it provided me with a structured way to interact with them. (Next time you’re at an awkward cocktail party, try interviewing whoever’s nearby.)

Nora Ephron, the journalist-turned-filmmaker, found this to be a practically universal trait among reporters, herself included: “I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everyone else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all,” she wrote in her aptly named essay collection, Wallflower at the Orgy.299