In 2016 I ran a fellowship and was training the fellows in “how to ask for things.” I started them with very basic asks, like walking around the neighborhood & asking for restaurant recommendations

This one fellow, I’ll call him Todd, was terrified of approaching anyone.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they might think I’m weird, he said.

“Well, can’t you just read their reaction to you, and if it seems like they really don’t want to talk, you just back off?”

“Uh…”

I asked Todd to practice on me. I noticed something was funny with his eyes. I squinted. They were at the wrong focal length!

“Todd,” I asked, “Are you actually looking at the features of my face right now?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I had taught the fellows some introspection tools, so he used one and then reported something like, “Faces are scary.”

“Why?”

“Because if I look at them, I’ll see that everyone rejects me.”

I think this is at the root of most vibe-blindness. Ironically, if you’re not letting yourself read basic cues because you don’t want to perceive rejection, you’re going to get rejected A LOT more. Why? Because you’re going to accidentally be creepy by not calibrating yourself in real-time. You'll miss the facial cues that tell you what lights someone up and what shuts them down. It’s a self-feeding loop.

I suspect a lot of people with this sort of vibe-blindness got rejected hard early in childhood. If this is you, you can go try to notice the features of someone’s face, and then, when fear arises, ask “What is my first memory of this feeling?” And then just hang out tenderly with whatever comes up. (And ideally let yourself cry. You might need to mourn the years you spent closing down your perceptual world because Person X rejected you.)

After Todd and I ran the diagnosis, he went around finally looking at people’s faces. It turned out that most people seemed happy to talk to him once they understood he was looking for restaurant recs. Todd now watched as their faces lit up