Except I now had an ideological panoply of males before me, but I had no idea where to begin. One specific problem was that I didn’t know how to end conversations. No boy-of-interest had ever started a conversation with me. And I, in turn, had never started a conversation with one. So naturally, I had no idea how or when one was finished.

I went with my best guess: just swiveling on my heels and walking away abruptly, whenever there seemed to be a lull. I tried this in my first week, in the cafeteria, with a cute guy who had expressed an interest in me.

Sauntering away, I remember thinking, Yes, this was the right thing to do, which is something people never think when it actually was.

I wish it had been a phase. I wish I was the nerd who became hot by taking off my glasses. But social skills are skills. At my first party in college, I felt inept and imperiled, the way people feel the very first time they try to strike a match.

Well into my job at the Washington Post, I was hounded by a feeling that my employer shouldn’t have taken a chance on someone like me, who didn’t grow up reading her hometown newspaper and penning precocious letters to the editor. I was someone who had instead spent all her time watching Saved by the Bell and falling even further behind the coterie of well-read ideators.

Having been weird for so long still haunts me in so many ways: Like when I feel like I can’t socialize without a glass of wine oiling me up from the inside—and how often I replay those conversations after the fact. Or the time my therapist held out one hand parallel to the floor to show me where everyone else is, mood-wise, and then held out another hand, about six inches lower than the other one, as though her hands were two trains about to pass each other, and I was on the lower train, going in the wrong direction. “Your affect is kind of, here,” she said, jiggling the bottom, depressive hand. Sometimes, strangers ask me if I’m lost.

A few years ago, I was interviewing a man named Michael Ain, and in the middle of our conversation I started to feel unusually, well, insecure about my inability to get over my insecurities. This is what he told me:

In the early 1980s, Michael was wrapping up his junior year at Brown University. He had excellent grades, a record of volunteer work, and a stack of awards from his elite high school, Phillips Academy. He was determined to pursue a career in medicine, so he made an appointment with the adviser in charge of students who were med-school bound.