I had gone out one night to a friend of a friend's house for a small gathering and I could hear her housemates commenting quietly to each other as I left. "I was just trying to be polite, you know, start a conversation. She was kind of a bitch."

My quiet disposition often elicits this reaction from those who don't know me. People tend to find me intimidating, assume I think the worst of them, or that I don't care enough to try to get to know them. I only know this because most feel the need to tell me after we've become friends. "You're not as bad as I thought you were, you just come off as mean," they say. "You were really intimidating before I got to know you."

I'm that girl in your project group who does her portion of the work without uttering a word. I'm that friend of a friend who just stood there, arms crossed, failing to make eye contact. I’m the reason GSIs actually care about participation points. I am painfully shy.

The "bitch-factor" problem arises mostly due to a lack of verbal communication on my part. This leads others to read the only other social signals expressed without talking: body language. A major problem with this: I frown when thinking.

People often misunderstand the silence itself, probably because it is often seen as judgment or superiority. It’s the fear that some girls are silent because they were just talking about you or that certain guys chose not to respond because he thinks he's above it. My inability to strike up or even maintain conversation with new people leads some to label me snobby, mean, rude or bitchy.

The simple truth is I'm shy because I'm uncomfortable around those I don't know well. And it takes me quite some time to feel I know someone well. This lack of comfort extends to the point where I'd rather mentally leave the situation and gaze around the room thinking — giving up on finding the right words instead of trying and speaking the wrong ones.

I've always been this way. For as long as I can remember I've had very few — but close — friends, and I usually only make new friends through friends of friends who become accustomed to my quiet demeanor.

My friends have often tried to guess why I am the way I am. They'll say it's a lack of confidence, fear of rejection or that I just don't try. They can't understand how I can be so open with them but hardly speak to others.

For me, it's that the words build their own little towers of multicolored Lego sentences, making one-sided conversations that never come to be. I'm somewhat of a perfectionist and it's the lack of confidence, not in myself, but in the chance that what I say will be satisfactory, that stops me from speaking. I'm left high and dry with the words on the tip of my tongue but without the damn will to say them.

This probably stems from growing up with a talkative, Bronx-bred Latina mother who knows and is loved by everyone. She's the kind of woman who can step into a supermarket checkout line and come out with three new friends and a party invitation. Growing up with her, I didn't feel the need to take the spotlight in conversations, so I never did.

During the summer, to the surprise of my friends and family, I attempted to improve my social skills by throwing myself into the lion's den of all small-talk-with-strangers jobs — I waitressed.

While I worked there only one summer, I noticed that I had made noticeably less in tips then the other servers, and wasn't often given the area with tge greatest costumer flow. I think it was because the other waitresses knew how to smile in that way people do when they greet strangers. It's not to say that I didn't smile, it's that I didn’t have that outgoing-girl smile. My smiles being more authentic, they tended to creep costumers out more than make them feel welcome. Often I have been asked "What are you smiling about?" when taking orders.

While the waitressing experiment failed in some respects (I still have enormous trouble talking to people I don't know) it did teach me a few things. It taught me how to deal with rude people. I now speak up when someone is being an ass, rather than sitting back thinking about what I'd like to say to them.

Once, in the parking lot of the restaurant, I was almost run over by a customer's car on my way into work. My manager just happened to have watched the entire scene unfold. The customer speedily backed out of his parking spot without bothering to look behind him. I jumped out of the way and the car barely misses me as it continued to zoom in reverse and hit another car.

My manager later yelled at me, not because I had almost gotten hit and should've paid more attention to crazy customers on their way out, but because I didn't say anything to her, the man or the police documenting the fender-bender. I was almost hit by a car, which in turn hit another car, and I said nothing about it to anyone, let alone the driver.