Social Anxiety

Does anyone else feel this way or can everyone nonchalantly strike up a conversation with strangers?

One of the members in my club/fraternity invited me to hang out with them and their friends. I don’t try to make friends at my university because I find it bothersome. If I ever want to hang out, I’d have to drive an hour to see them. It would be a waste of my time and (gas) money when I could just make friends around town and hang out around locally. Anyways, since I only have one more semester, I thought that I should stop restricting myself and push myself to meet new people. This way, through practice, it would also get me more comfortable to talk to strangers (i.e. future employers).

When I got to where him and his friends were, I could not get myself to open the door. I was too scared.

“Will they think I’m weird?”
“What happens if all his friends talk to themselves and just leave me out?”
“If this goes wrong, will him and his friends spread rumors about me in the club?”
“Do I look weird?”
“Do I smell okay?”
“What if I don’t know what to say?”

When I’m interacting with someone new, if it’s a one-to-one conversation, I can handle that. Even if it’s not true, it makes me feel like I can “control” the conversation and I have proper time to react and adjust accordingly to whatever the person’s going to say. If there’s more than one other person in the conversation, then I feel like I “lose” control. The other people can have a conversation within themselves and their voices can drown mine out. If there’s too many people, I’d realize no one’s paying attention to me so that means I don’t really need to focus on the conversation and can stay quiet and disassociate to think about anything else until they call on me.

I couldn’t get myself to open the door and I just stood outside for 20 minutes. Delusional, I thought that I could listen in to their conversation from the outside so I can be prepared to join in the conversation and have some jokes ready. I guess I was standing for too long, and the guy came outside to look for me. Caught off guard, I pretended to have just arrived. He bought it. When I got in, there were 2 other people that were all sitting around a table. That table had no more space for me. They can try to squeeze me in but it’d just be awkward and squished so I opted for a lone chair in the corner. Not the best choice, I know, but the room was really small so it didn’t really matter where I sat. His friends did try to talk to me and my responses were okay, but they had their own inside jokes which I couldn’t be a part of. Eventually, they talked about their own things like planning future trips together or on outings. I knew they probably weren’t going to extend an invitation and they didn’t (which is completely okay since it’s their own boundaries), so for the whole 2 hours I just looked around the room and kept quiet to myself. I didn’t want to take out my phone cause I thought it’d look too rude.

Later, another one of his friends stopped by and I got introduced to him as well. I wanted to leave so bad but I couldn’t find a good excuse. Eventually one of his friends left and I took that as an opportunity to leave too. Being confined like that made me feel so uncomfortable. They were all nice and they did invite me to go clubbing with them at the end, but I think they were just saying it as a polite gesture.

TLDR: I met new people and was very awkward the whole time.