Shy redditors, what opportunities did you miss because of your shyness?

Oh boy, my shyness has never caused me so much depression and regret until the following happened. Here we go. I'll tell you some backstory and then I'll do the actual shyness story.

Backstory: I had just started the 9th grade, had no real intention of making any friends, talked to a few people but never really stuck around any. But one day, a guy came up to me and asked me if I wanted to buy drugs from him, being the little rebel that I was I bought some from him, not realizing what the fuck I was getting myself into. He starts calling my phone harassing me, always begging me to buy more from him and to give him rides to places and so on. Eventually, I told him to stop bugging me and I don't want his drugs and shit anymore he was so fucking pushy. Me telling him to leave me alone really pissed him off, so much to the point that he would call me approximately every 15-20 minutes just to see if I would pick up, and rarely did I ever, if just to tell him to stop fucking calling me. I had to change my cell number (thankfully I never gave him my home phone #). This all happened in September-December 2013. So fast forward to about October 2014 and I had totally separated myself from any other person in that school for a full year nearly, barely even spoke to anyone at all and nobody spoke to me, so I was happy enough.

Shyness Story: Alright so now we are in October 2014, I'm sitting outside of my morning classroom waiting for the teacher to come open the door, and this girl that I had never really heard speak who was also in my morning class comes up to me and says "Hey, what's your name" I respond with my name, she tells me hers. We start a conversation about how cold it is and how we wish it would just snow a bunch so that we could get out of school and so on, just a typical conversation really, I thought nothing of it, until she said this, "I don't really hang out with anyone, but if I were to, I would want it to be with you because you seem like a really cool guy." At this point I still think nothing of her, my honest thoughts at that moment were "Fuck you, I don't want any friends, leave me alone" But I just sorta smiled and nodded and didn't really respond to her after she told me this. I didn't know what else to do. This was the ONLY time in this class that we had ever spoke. So now we're in the next term, and she is in my intensive reading class, I still didn't want to be her friend at this point then, low and behold, a few days into the new class that we had together, she sees me in the hallway one day and says the same thing as before, "I don't really hang out with anyone, but if I were to, I would want it to be with you because you seem like a really cool guy." It felt kinda strange hearing her say this again, but I just sorta smiled and nodded again, and ignored her for the rest of our term in that class. Part of the reason I didn't want to be her friend was because she talked about going to night clubs and smoking weed, and I had zero interest in doing either of those things. Well, Christmas came and passed and so did the new year. It is now March of 2015, and she sees me sitting outside of our third class that we had together now, Spanish II, on the first day, while waiting for the class to start, she tells me again that she really wants to be my friend, even uttering the words "I love you, man..." I still didn't want to be her friend, but I let her use my Spanish book cause she didn't have one and she didn't really want to buy one, we talked a bit during class time, but not alot, I still didn't want to be her friend. It was starting to feel fucking weird ignoring her, so I thought it over for a few days, and finally, I moved to a seat right by her and we became friends, she gave me her number, added me on Facebook, well low and behold, spring break comes and she never fucking comes back to school, she dropped all of her classes apparently.Well no big deal, she can always just come back next term. Since she stopped coming to school, we've talked a bit, went to a mall once, and now we're here. I feel absolutely awful for ignoring her for all of that time, and to know that we could have been friends for all of this time and had hung out. So anyways, I just kinda wanted to get that off my chest.

No TL;DR for this one, it's just too personal for me. Maybe I'm insane. I know that the grammar is horrible, but I don't give a shit, putting this here for myself mostly.

/r/AskReddit Thread