Your personality isn’t gray, that’s a perception fo yourself, which is only true because it’s self-reinforcing: you see yourself as such and such, so you act in a certain way, and thus it get’s confirmed to you.

I also notice that you’re speaking in absolutes: “no one will ever take [me] seriously”, “what always winds up happening”, but that’s not true. Those things don’t always happen. You’ve had moments when people took you seriously, but you’re constructing an identity around those negative experiences.

This morning, I offered to buy some landscapers bottled water and they stared at me like I was insane.

Everyone on earth has a ton of examples of moments when they were embarrased in a social situation, but nobody has examples of moments when they were thinking “person X was doing something embarrasing and I despise them for it”. You’re ascribing a certain judgement to those people, which doesn’t necessarily exist, but you let it control the way you act in social situations. Stop that. In reality, people don’t judge you as much as you think they do, just like you’re not morally judging them. You think they do (a lot of people think that, myself included in the past), and that’s logical, because you’re the epicenter of your own experiences, but in general people don’t think about us that much, they don’t remember our self-perceived embarasing moments.

In his early days as a party member, Stalin’s colleagues described him as a “grey blur”

Make of that what you will.

Edit: if you want advice though, my advice is don’t be too nice. People will respect you less. Being nice is good, but doing it arbitrarily can put people off.