Wandering the streets of New York, a man approached me and complimented my camera bag. We happened to have the same one. It was a simple coincidence, but this man was able to turn a minute detail into a 30-minute conversation about our lives. It seemed almost effortless for him. Impressed by his boldness, as most New Yorkers are, I asked him for an interview. I learned that boldness didn’t come from just anywhere. It came from a need to talk to people, and a need to overcome his social anxiety.
I asked him if he gets intimidated by people, and his instant response was, “All the ****ing time, you know.”
Meet Devere, a street photographer from Brooklyn in his late twenties. This wasn’t his first rodeo talking to strangers; in fact, he does it all the time. I asked him if he gets intimidated by people, and his instant response was “All the ****ing time, you know.”
Devere has always had a love-hate relationship with people like many of us do. He loves to get a unique perspective and see how other people work, but his anxiety has held him back from talking to people in the past. From people on the subway to his teachers in school, he used to simply people-watch. “I would say it was a scary experience talking to anybody.”
Regardless of those fears, he learned to push himself to create small talk with the people around him, as he did with me that day with a simple compliment. “I was like, that bag looks kind of familiar,” Devere said. “This is a conversation topic. Smaller things.” By overcoming his instincts of being afraid of other people, Devere has enriched his own life and created an “us” out of everyone he’s talked to in Brooklyn. Now, this people-watcher turned people-talker has an “us” in Utah, too.