I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve ever really learned to have dialogues with other people. I thought I did, but sometimes it feels closer to a description of “parallel play,” like I take a turn to talk and then I take a turn to listen to the other person. I wait until someone brings up a topic that I’m interested in, and then I jump in, ready to share my very intense thoughts. I tend to talk loudly and quickly and with passion. And when I’m done, I’m done. That’s all I had to say, friends.
Bursts of me speaking are not dialogue, right?
Conversation is actually something else. Only I’m not sure what it is, or if I want to participate in it.
I recognize small talk and I understand on some level why people engage in it. It’s easy, low stakes talk that doesn’t reveal too much about you when you’re not sure you trust the other person enough to offer them more. Maybe some people don’t trust anyone. Maybe some people don’t have an interest in deeper conversation. This is probably above my pay grade in evaluation.
I like listening to conversation, so it’s not painful for me to sit quietly and wait until I’m required to say something “appropriate.” In general, my family was terrible at teaching me what was “appropriate” and what wasn’t. The only thing my father ever taught me was to say “thank you” to compliments when I could identify them as such. He was himself terrible at accepting anything, least of all compliments. Most of my family are either autistic or autist-adjacent. So that’s how I was “socialized.”
Am I missing something here? Probably. I miss a lot of things.
But hey, I also get to spend all that extra time in my own head, and that’s not such a bad place to be.
This post cracked me up -- not laughing at you, laughing with you. I've worked very hard to develop a "conversation mode" but am not sure how successful I've been at it. Ironically, for several years when I was teaching English to speakers of other languages at a state university English Language program, one of my regular classes was "Advanced Conversation". Because American norms are often hard for newcomers and visitors from other cultures to understand and adapt to, this was a popular class. I now think it is very amusing that it was like an alien from another planet teaching humans from other countries how to carry on conversations with Americans.