Cheating my social anxiety with T-Shirts

The backstory

I’d always been a fairly reserved individual. I had friends who I could be open and charismatic with and talk with for hours but I never really dared to strike up a conversation with strangers.

These friendships were always ones that were kinda just handed to me, through school, family, yada yada. This formula worked decently until last year when I had to move to Berlin. I was content with my solitude for a while but the lack of friends and family eventually turned into loneliness.

I wanted to make new friends so I went to meetups, bars, any other community event which was somewhat related to my interest. But I found that once I got there I tended to just fade into the background. I couldn’t bring myself to reach out to a person and without an active effort from me it seemed like the others kinda just found their own people, that spoke their language or were in a similar age group.

So that didn’t really work, and the awkwardness just felt very overwhelming so I stopped going after a few months.

The shirts

Anyway, at some point I found Qwertee¹, a site selling t-shirts printed with random art, on reddit. Humor had always been my outlet so I just ordered a few that I found funny without thinking much of it. On the first day I wore one of them outside, I was standing on the train on the way to work, a guy across the wagon looked at me for a bit, chuckled, pointed at the shirt and did a thumbs-up gesture. My co-workers also complimented it at the lunch table later that day.

I usually just wore very basic, neutral colors when going out in public because I was also very self-conscious, but this gave me enough of a confidence boost to start wearing them more frequently outside. I went back to one of these meetups, and similarly someone saw my shirt, came over and gave me a compliment. I didn’t have to start the conversation, the other person did, or rather the shirt did it for me. They took away the most overwhelming parts of it.

It wasn’t a cheat code to make friends still, you still have to interact a few times before people start trusting you and form a connection. In a big city like Berlin, it is rather difficult to run into the same person multiple times this way but it definitely increases your number of possible hits.

DIY designs

I was impressed with the effect these shirts had, so I decided to DIY some designs that reflected me, my personality and my interests better. I’m not the best at graphic design, so I just made them colorful and goofy, with a generous amount of PowerPoint 2003 WordArt, reasoning being the color makes the shirt/me more noticeable, the goofiness makes me seem more approachable and I know that if we share the same sense of humor we’re more likely to get along so it also acts as a pre-filter.

On one occassion I was wearing one of my designs that complained about allergies, “everything’s blooming, including my sinuses”, someone came up to me and complimented my shirt. We talked for a bit about our shared annoyance with the reproductive system of plants. We ran into each other again at another meetup a few weeks later, he remembered me as the “allergy t-shirt guy”, we talked, exchanged contacts and he became my first friend in Berlin.

I didn’t go to college so I can’t do a scientific study on whether goofy shirts aid in social anxiety, but from anecdata, I’d say they do.

I’ve uploaded my designs on my Redbubble page if you want to get them for yourself or you can explore some other artists there.