Continued in Silence
My brain has been trained to notice every subtle indication of potential danger within an environment, situation, or person, mostly outside of my control. As a result, I hate small talk, because not only do I already have to analyze the surroundings, but now I must analyze you, myself, and this entire conversation. I would much rather just stay home, as opposed to having a forced and honestly unwanted engagement due to my lack of “outside presence”. Active listening has always been hard for me. Not because I’m so self-involved that I couldn’t possibly bother myself with paying attention, but that I’m actually paying attention to every possible thing, all at once. Even creating narratives that haven’t happened and probably never will because thinking in worst case scenarios is my default, not my choice. So, in my personal opinion, small talk has been rigged from the start. It’s never felt natural, not even once. Having to consciously worry about how much is too much prolonged eye contact, going back and forth between nodding my head and accurately timing my responses. Deciding on whether to share that very personal and embarrassing thing about me, which gives no actual relevance to the story, but is the only way I’ve learned to participate. Over the course of my life, I’ve noticed that aggressively yet authentically oversharing is both my escape attempt and my only form of connection.
Conversing with people can be overwhelming because I get stuck in this loop of needing to anticipate the future but also staying present for long enough to grasp whatever is happening in front of me. Excessive and repetitive anxiety has hardwired my subconscious to fear life itself. Meaning the everyday mundane activities we experience while moving through life has an unnecessarily high chance of triggering my fight, flight, freeze or fawn response. Taking out the trash, ordering from a new (or sometimes even old) menu, pumping gas, or even taking a short stroll down my block, all has the possibility to draw undesired attention. That attention then forces me into a heightened state of mind that then sends my body into a frenzy, thinking it needs to prepare itself for imminent danger. Tunnel vison, rapid heart rate, uneven breathing, profusely sweating, uncontrollable shaking, and even briefly forgetting how to speak all because the gentleman at the drive thru window asked me one extra question I wasn’t prepared to answer. And now I’m obligated for the next 3 years minimum to ruminate on whether he thought I was a complete idiot or not.
When I was a young child, I considered going mute, because even at that age I was able to acknowledge how difficult certain things were for me compared to my peers. I couldn’t properly articulate this at the time, so instead it shaped my personality into this extremely meek and timid individual, an identity that would later blossom into an exaggerated form of people pleasing.
Unlike most people I rely on scripts in social situations as a form to navigate through any interaction as smoothly as possible, as well as coming across as a functional adult and masking the amount of “AHHHHHHH” that’s happing within me. I tend to stay on script because the alternative is me talking about things only I find interesting, which just leads to me becoming the weird girl who has an abnormal amount of knowledge regarding Jonathan Taylor Thomas and energetically expresses her unnatural anguish over Kimimaro being killed off before making it to Shippuden. Seriously, that was a lost opportunity, though I digress.
Being labeled the odd, quiet, possibly mysterious but definitely unusual girl my whole life wasn’t something I was necessarily proud of, but it was the only version of myself I was able to maintain after the best parts of me were taken away. Ironically, connection and community are very important to me. And once established, I view you as family. Though getting to that point takes time and intentional effort, and people these days no longer have the patience nor cherish the journey of friendship. Therefore, I no longer have the energy to prove that being neurodivergent doesn’t take away my ability to be an adequate daughter, friend, or lover despite being who I was forced to become. So I continue in silence.
