For the entirety of my life when I was given the opportunity to speak to a willing listener, I would not shut up. Most of the time I’m a very typical introverted and shy person, but when I go off on a tangent… I go off. This nasty habit of mine has extended to the keyboard, where I feel more at ease to start conversations and continue them… which is why I don’t have internet friends (or hardly any friends period).

Part of the reason for this is that I love the sound of typing, but that is a minor incentive to my chatterbox in comparison to the fact I do love to talk. I may be a intrapersonal mind, but I do like to externalize my isolated world and interact. Unfortunately, I’m also very poor at it. Tangents never go well… in text or speech.

Just ask my fifth grade classmates… I loved going off about end of the world scenarios. Explaining the singularity to a bunch of ten year olds? My idea of fun, their nightmare of boredom. I even got fired from a student assistant position in 7th grade because I wouldn’t shut up in class. That might surprise some of the people who know me in real life now, but that’s because I went through a change.

I began to realize that no one was actually listening to me. That was devastating… no one wants to be ignored. This was probably one of the triggering factors to my longstanding depression, and I still feel like no one wants to talk to me anymore… because then they’ll have to listen to me. And apparently… that’s a miserable experience.

Learning to converse isn’t easy for everyone, especially if you are a potential aspie like myself. I’m still struggling not to talk about me or my interests unless I make it a you piece somehow, especially if it is a wall of text as long as this. Nobody wants to listen to me, because I am boring and self-centered. Occasionally I make exceptions, like this journal, but only to make a point.

I’m questing not to bore you. I’m trying to talk more about others than myself. To condense my casual writing and speech. But for those of you who have even some skill in conversing, that is insanely difficult if you don’t know how to do it automatically.

But I’m also sure that some of you don’t know what it’s like to live in silence either… and to get used to it. The silence isn’t anywhere near as bad as waking up one day and realizing that you prefer to be alone than having to deal with the frustrated sighs or chat conversations gone dead. To realize you stopped keeping friendships because it was just too much work to have a decent conversation.

Then there comes the daunting realization: who am I questing not to bore? I only have one friend I talk to more than once a week. What a late realization. I hate being tardy.