IN MY MIND: Talking Is Hard

Because of how my brain works and my general personality, I can find communication really difficult. After a year of mainly interacting with people over Zoom or any number of other online platforms, I've been thinking about it a lot and wanted to... Uh... Communicate that.

I was a quiet kid and looking back, I can see why that was. There was a lot going on in my mind that I wouldn't understand until decades later, so I spent a lot of time confused in my own head. I had interests that differed from most of my peers - an unsurprising amount of these being traditionally gendered interests like sports, etc. - and a few toxic people and bullies in my school that led to me being a bit of a loner and left me with very little self-confidence. There's one year of school where I pretty much only talked to my teachers or the school librarian, so I often feel like I missed out on a lot of the period where everyone else in my class was developing social skills. I guess I've felt like I've been playing catch-up ever since.

My parents encouraged me to take part in a lot of extracurricular activities and groups, but nothing really clicked until I joined a local drama group and could to talk as someone not myself. I was luckily able to take Drama as subject in high school and made friends that way. I have been lucky that was able to carry that passion into University and have it evolve into what is my improv career today. Slowly and surely I built something resembling self-confidence, but there was always a strong boundary between the confidence of the 'me' onstage and the 'me' offstage. Of course, with University there also came alcohol and for a while that seemed like a great shortcut into socialising until I realised I was relying on it way too heavily and realised I had a serious problem. Around about this time I also found out I had some serious mental health problems with my anxiety and my OCD and things slowly started to improve. There was a lot going on.

I saw a therapist for 4 years and one of the main things we talked about was how I relate to other people. For all the reasons above and many more, it's always been a struggle for me to trust that the people I'm talking to actually want me to be there. It doesn't matter how close we are or how long we've been friends, that social anxiety is ever-present and unavoidable for me. I easily revert to that terrified and alienated child who has no idea how to communicate and no idea why people would want to try in the first place. That's a lot to bring into every single social interaction I have. My brain is also wired in ways that I don't fully understand, but definitely don't feel neurotypical.

Some of the ways this manifests are pretty obvious if you've spent much time with me. I leap onto topics that I know even a little about and talk excitedly about them to prove I can contribute, regardless of if that was the main topic or if someone else was talking. I fill silences immediately, because silence means boredom and boredom means people don't want to be there. I'll have extremely strong opinions about things I don't know or care that much about, because I spent so much of my life never trusting myself that I overcompensate and commit hard to things i really don't need to. My mind will race ahead somewhere or become become stuck on something from earlier, meaning I'll either respond to something from ages ago in the conversation or rapidly change the subject to something my mind has made a connection to two steps in the future. I often miss soical cues like jokes, flirting, annoyance or subtle hints to change the topic. I'm sure there are a million other things I do in conversations that drive people mad and I spend a considerable amount of energy DURING said conversations obsessively imagining what they might be. Basically, I'm amazed people aren't constantly exhausted just being in the same social space as me.

I think that since coming out a few years ago and becoming more comfortable with myself, I'd been getting better at a lot of these things, but the past year has made me really aware of how far I still have to go. Cross-talking and interrupting on Zoom basically silences the person you're talking over, so it's hard to miss when i do that. My anxious paranoia over silences is amplified a million times by technical limitations like lag and poor connections. Side conversations - so often an oasis for me in a crowded room - are basically impossible. I'm hyper aware of how often I do or do not initiate conversations or invite people to meetings, etc. and constantly panic whether it's too much or too little depending on the person...

There's not really an end or coherent central point to this. That's another aspect of communication I struggle with. I just wanted to say that it's been hard. For all the people I've talked over, ignored, upset, offended, annoyed or just plain confused, I'm sorry. Just know that I am trying. I love talking to people! I just need to finally catch up on how to do it.