TLDR: Get out of your apartment, get a cheap drink *if you want*, and meet people in your community through a structured activity!!! A perfect recipe for getting out of your comfort zone while not being too overwhelmed about it!
*Disclaimer: If you’re sober but still enjoy the vibe and are comfortable being around booze, I swear to you I would never notice if you had a NA bev or never drank anything and I don’t think anyone else would either, nor would they care if they did catch on*
But I‘ve been doing bar trivia for almost 2 years now and it’s SO much fun, especially when you have a good host and you’re in a group that cares enough to try but not enough to get too hung up on getting things wrong. We mostly yap between questions/rounds and the hosts have always loved us. We‘ve moved around because places have closed and/or our schedules changed and we needed a different night of the week. But going to different places with different vibes has helped with my social anxiety SO much like I’m much more confident with interacting with different types of people now and much less worried that they’re not going to like me. Sometimes other trivia teams haven’t liked us but we’ve learned to be like “so what?” and just keep vibing bc we’re not hurting anyone. And when we get questions that feel tailor-made for us, like when it has to do with our homestates or hometowns (we’re all transplants) or with our special interests, we get a high we can ride the rest of the week.
And KARAOKE is the BEST! You get to do whatever song you want, and it is more fun to do one that gets the crowd going, but also if I wanna do a country song I’m nostalgic for but no one else knows, screw y’all I’m gonna enjoy my 3 minutes and give you a show. Also, there’s some regulars but also always some wildcards which keeps it interesting, like last week a huge NJ dude who may have been a mobster and who put his name down as Bonesaw, pulled me up to two-step with him to an old country song. Where else are you gonna get that sort of experience?
