Lock Me Away

I shouldn't be allowed to talk to people. I only end up being a nuisance.

The problem is that I have nothing to say. I'm just not a particularly interesting person. One week is much like the other and so I rarely have anything particularly interesting to report.

All I tend to do is work, and when I'm not working, I'm usually doing nothing, thinking about how I really must try to tidy up, but never actually managing to do so. All of these things leave me with very little to actually say, and so when in conversation with someone, no matter how much I may enjoy their company, I just have this awful nagging feeling that.. well.. that I'm just being boring.

Combined with my sheer, utter phobia of hanging around for a moment longer than people want me there, it means that, unless some magical inspiration strikes me, a conversation ends up little more than "Hi! How are you?... Great!... Oh, I'm fine... No, nothing interesting really... [Panic] Well, must go! Goodbye!".

As well as being boring, it can't be much fun for whoever I'm talking to. So all in all, I start to get the feeling that I shouldn't be allowed to talk to people. At best, I'm wasting their time. At worst, I'm annoying them or in some way just failing to have left them better than when I found them. Maybe the reverse. I worry that others might worry as much as I do and do the same kind of "Is it me?" questioning that I put myself through. It's presumptuous to think that anyone is quite as unbalanced as I am. But I'd hate to think that I was bad for people.

What causes the lack of inspiration? Why can't I lay out an off-the-cuff conversation piece for us all to dance around at a moment's notice? Well, I suppose having no life probably has a lot to do with it. Maybe I've just run out of material. Maybe it took me 34 years to have lived enough to be able to hold down a few months of occasional conversation with people, but once that's gone, I have no more.

Maybe it's the style of conversation. Maybe instant message is just too "instant", too demanding, something that requires too much from either side, but especially from my own when ideas are in short supply. I can't even imagine phoning someone for a chat, with no idea what we might talk about. I used to be good at that. Annoyingly so, I suspect. But not now.

Maybe it's because I won't spend time in chat rooms any more. Because on the one hand, chat rooms are fairly non-threatening places. There's no shame in two people being in a chat room and having nothing to say, they're just enjoying the common experience of the company of others. If you don't want to say anything - or can't think of anything to say - then that's fine, nobody expects it. And you can stay silent until someone in the room finally says something that you can pick up and run with. It's easier to be interesting (or at least pretend) when you've got 46 other people to feed off.

But I don't do chat rooms any more, and maybe that's removed still more of the common ground that I had with people who I would otherwise IM. With even less of a shared experience, and nothing interesting of my own to contribute, it's no wonder that I find myself with nothing to say.

I'm glad that I can psychoanalyse myself to this degree - I'm sure it's something that others would pay good money for - but the final analysis always leaves my darker, sadder side telling me that the only solution to this problem is simply not to try talking to people. "It's embarrassing you, it hurts you, and it's boring them, or worse... and you shouldn't let that happen." - and the temptation to run and hide, to lock myself away from other people entirely becomes so strong.

I keep another blog which I don't show other people, and only post to in my particularly low times, but I'm noticing that a lot of what I've said here is really not entirely new. Perhaps I've articulated it more clearly here, as opposed to the ridiculously amateur "blank verse" style which seemed to be all I could get out in previous funks.

It almost seems like such a silly thing to worry about - but at least I think I know why it's happening now. And I think that makes things better. I just hope other people forgive me for being a lunatic.