"Anybody else feeling left out from their local group?"

#PokemonGO: I’ve been playing since the beginning and for the first year, my interaction with others have been very limited and I was fine playing by myself.But like with many other people, the introduction of raids lead me to start meeting new people who also appeared at the raids. I live in a semi-big city in the UK, so there’s a decently active group on Facebook and discord. Always raid groups going on and whatnot.Well, seeing people make friendships and sharing laughs and experiences together made me want to get into some of that. It’s not that I dislike interacting with people and talk to people. My problem is just that I’m socially hopeless, I acknowledge that. I’ve always had problems in social settings my entire life and while I have few friends, I’m generally pretty bad at interacting with especially new people and I definitely know I come off awkward, even though I try not to.But regardless, I was determined to make new friends in this game. I tried to strike up conversations with people at raids. I asked a bunch of people what they have caught today, if they have gotten any good IV’s of the current legendary boss recently, that sort of small talk.I always just seem to get the impression that people don’t care about me. I hate it when I try to talk to somebody while we’re waiting for others to show up at the raid and they’ll answer with like 1 or 2 words while staring at their screen, and I can see they are just casually fidgeting with the camera in-game and not doing anything important that would make them not take their eyes off their phone.And what especially gets to me is how whenever somebody they know will appear at a raid or whatever, there will be loud “Hey man! You came!” And excited conversations and laughters all around, but me being all socially awkward I can’t seem to find a way to be a part of that social circle.It has gotten to the point where the local community is very tight-knitted and everybody seems to know everybody. People will be tagging each other all over the place for nearby raids... But I always get left out of these tags. I guess that is to be expected since people only know me from these failed attempts of conversations that I’ve initiated but nevertheless, it really feels so disheartening. I’ve been trying ever since this summer and I’m pretty much done trying at this point. It doesn’t seem to get better. I try to figure out what I did wrong and try to fix that in my new interactions but nothing seems to really work. People that I’ve previously had small conversations with, will next day just walk past me as if I’m a complete stranger even if I try to casually make eye contact with them and they’ll walk straight past me to their actual pokemon buddies and not even give me a slight nod.The two community days have been the worst. Surely 3 hours of pokemon gathering should do the trick? Nah, everybody was so into each other’s groups, it seemed impossible for somebody like me to break through. I would awkwardly walk in between groups, just catch Pikachus and Dratinis, hoping and praying inside myself that ANYBODY would say anything to me. Just a single “hi” would have made my day. But no, zero interactions. I tried to take breaks from catching and look around a lot so as to not give the impression that I was fully concentrated on catching. I tried to look at people, smile, or just try my best to act open. Even put my phone away for 15 min to have somebody look in my direction too. But nothing happened.I everytime I leave my house to play, I come home feeling a little more dead inside. It’s a constant reminder of all my social anxiety and how I’ve been struggling making friends all my life, from school, to university, to work. I honestly can’t handle feeling this way anymore so I think I’ll be retreating and stop trying since every time I try, I’m left in a worse state than before. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2CTTtyi