Conversation is passing me by at the moment. I dove deep into the caverns of self reflection to find some answers. Maybe this will work for you, too?
Some online digging into social skills suggested “anecdotal information” is a useful tool.
I have things to say. I know things. I can learn things. Talking about things I know and learn doesn’t seem so bad. So why am I still tongue tied?
What do I know the most about, though? Well. Me. And only recently have I come to realize that most of what I can offer is personal experience. I am easy to talk to, as well, mother hen, always making sure everyone has a drink and knows how to get home. I help others and my whole social experience seems to be dominated by that. The experiences I’ve shared don’t last forever and the support I offer doesn’t hold up unless new experiences happen. And there have been relatively low “new experiences” for a while, now.
The company I’ve kept in the past decade has been decidedly distant or overwhelmingly needy. People I respect and trust and want to know, have been limited to group interactions where I can pepper conversations with seemingly innocuous anecdotes. They are secure enough that my aloofness doesn’t bother them, and I am usually interesting enough in person to validate being friendly towards me during a shared experience. But shared experiences only go as far as what’s in front of me. I never have a lot to offer in terms of additional information and I never attempt to connect with them on a personal level unless I have something to say about something they’ve been through… there’s that “shared experience” again. Even the things I write. Are usually about me or my experiences. Gawd I am self involved, aren’t I?!
I can’t even narrow it down to a social group. I am the same wherever I go. I gravitate towards people who want to talk [read: complain] about life, not people who actually have anything much to offer in terms of learning experience. I can witter on for ages about life problems because I’ve had many. I can offer anecdotes of drug fueled nonsense to others who have had similar experiences. But is any of this interesting?
What do I actually contribute?
I consume things. Music, food, art. Life. But what am I putting back out there? Right now, it’s still anecdotal experiences entirely linked to myself. If someone asks me about a band, I have nothing concrete to share other than when/where I saw them and my experience, I don’t know that the drummer has done his own thing, nor do I really care. If someone asks me about vegan food (I’m not vegan but have recently taken up plant based cooking for fun) I have no ‘tried and tested’ methods, just tails of concoctions. I don’t really care about a lot of the things I consume, over and above what they mean to me personally.
I love to tell stories. Most of them are based on my experiences, though. Who’s going to be interested in the experiences of some random girl? Most of the people who are interested in me as a person, know me as a person. The stories I tell aren’t the hook, they’re the reason to stick around. And this is where I feel the challenge arises. Because people have just appeared in my life, I have always had people to “be around”. This snowballs onto other people. As I’ve aged, I never gave much thought to growing friendships. Not even with people who already had a vested interest in me as a person, such as family. Over the years, my haphazard offerings have been sidelined. People have made friends with others who share their interests or activities. If all I share with them is a loose connection to a party back in 2004, I am woefully unequipped to make the cull. And instead of forging new friendships myself, I’ve continued to just explode randomness onto the people I’ve been around.
Why? Well. Friends are hard work. Making friends is not the same as being friendly. I am friendly. I will talk to anyone. But I have hardly any real friends. The people I trust, have been useful acquaintances. The adopted teenagers who absorb my alternative ‘life skills’ lessons because school never worked for them and society ostracized them. The surrogate parents who offer me a bed, a sofa and a warm meal; pity and disdain for being able to buy their own houses on a single working class income for five thousand pounds back in the eighties whilst a full time teacher with two degrees was living out of a car in 2020.
People I called close friends were actually enablers. People with their own struggles. Shared experiences largely limited to shared coping mechanisms. Shared trauma made people feel comfortable and drugs and alcohol lowered inhibitions and made us feel good, giving us more to talk about. Even the list of ex partners. They came to me to fulfill a sexual need. When I started to fulfill multiple needs including “fun after a bevvy” and “can cook and clean”, they called me a partner and counted their blessings. The need became the prop. Without the need, who am I? What do I have to offer other than supporting other people in their quest for life?
Learning how to communicate with people you don’t know, who don’t need you, is hard. The most helpful common piece of advice is to find people with shared interests, But this is where I draw a blank. I’m interested in society. Societies. Culture. Ways of life. But for some reason, I haven’t explored this interest. Instead, I’ve consumed other people’s interests in shallow meaningless ways. I like a lot of things, but my interests are more philosophical. It’s tough to jump in with philosophical questions to people you don’t know. Even harder to move away from that philosophical discussion to actual friendship. At the same time, my shallow knowledge of anything I otherwise refer to as an interest, perpetuates the assumption that I am shallow myself. Few interesting people are interested in shallow. Me included. But convincing someone I am not, is tricky.
It’s hard to find people who communicate the way I do. I read things that interest me, and generally these things are quite narrow and specific but covering a broad range of topics. I learned about hydro power because Scotland has lots of schemes that I come across on my travels, I learned about abandoned castles and the downsides to commercial sheep farming. But trying to talk about any of these topics with people with lifelong interests, has been tricky as I know little else other than the narrow knowledge I pursued. And because I learned deeply about something niche or narrow, those who are less interested, don’t want to continue a conversation, either.
Even people who study the fields I have a broader experience of such as education, tend to have knowledge of surface level concepts rather than in depth knowledge of what is actually going on. And those who do? Are often interested in little else.
Takeaway: I’m not wrong. There’s no “wrong” way to communicate. I know things. I say things. As long as I continue to learn things and say things, I will be fine. Maybe I have to be content with the fact I am a drop in friend when it comes to interests and I will only be able to count true friends on one hand. Maybe I have to stop facilitating others and start helping myself. Instead of a night in the pub lamenting the downfall of society with people I don’t know or care about, I can spend a night online learning about hydro power and industrial metal? Hmmm choices choices.
FaerieFalls 