#and JFC I am SO MUCH MORE SOCIALLY ANXIOUS THAN ANYONE (I think) ACTUALLY REALIZES.

[musicrunsthroughmysoul]

One of my best friends will literally talk for six hours (when we're on the phone - with plenty of pauses in between) but only ask or wait for my input about three times, while one of my other best friends will infodump to me for two hours and then tell me specifically "Okay, I talked way too much this time - YOU need to talk more next time". ._.

I originally put this rant in the tags but now my tags are ridiculously long so, INTO THE VOID OF THE POST THEY GO.

I wish I could talk more when talking with my first best friend, but at the same time I feel like I never say the right things or ever even really say WHAT'S on my mind with her. I struggle really bad with feeling like I'm ever actually saying anything of substance that I WANT to say. And given the fact that I write a novel every single fucking time that I post online, I clearly HAVE THINGS TO SAY, but I DON'T SAY THEM when it matters, or - in particular - when I am talking with someone patient enough to listen to me/what I have to say. 😭

But with my other best friend (who ASKS me to talk more when we talk on the phone), I feel awkward trying to share things that I know they're not into even though they've told me before that they like to listen to me talk/tell stories, so...oof! I am just insecure. 😭 Oh, and of course my best friend who infodumps to me is also a listener, so I understand them quite well, too.

It's just that I often struggle to follow my first best friend's train of thought because her thought process goes off into thirty different, often unrelated, directions, so because of that in particular I never KNOW when the right time to interject is because she's probably off on a third tangent by the time I think of what I actually want to say following her first train of thought. D: But I hate to complain about it, and I feel awful about struggling with that. It is just...a major difference between us. :/

And, like, I know that I give way too many details about stuff and simultaneously miss saying the most important points of stuff (my mom accuses me of literally "burying the lede" when I talk to her sometimes. Can you tell she's into journalism, and always did extremely well in her journalism classes? And why I could NEVER be successful in journalism classes, let alone actual journalism?), and I preface everything I say to the fourth degree, but it doesn't take me long to return to my first thought (especially because I usually rush whatever I preface with, on purpose, because I know they're not the most important points but it's still important to me to make these things known for context). For my first best friend, though, it takes her 2-3 hours to return to her first thought - and sometimes that's with my miraculously accomplished nudging.

I know with my both of my best friends, our conversations are often very imbalanced in terms of who talks/shares the most, and I know there shouldn't be such an imbalance, but I don't know HOW to mention the imbalance to them without sounding like a COMPLETE ASSHOLE! Plus...well, I am insecure and socially anxious. Like with my other best friend who urges me to talk more, when they actually give me time to think about what I want to say so that I am able to talk about what I actually want to talk about, a lot of the time (but not just with this friend - this happens to me in everyday conversations with anybody at all), suddenly, it's like everything I AM able to say is nothing at all that I intend or actually want to say. I guess that's the problem with having the sort of socially anxious-tinted filter that I have: I think about what I say before I say it so deeply that I end up censoring myself almost completely in terms of what I ever actually want to say. The only time I say anything that I actually intend to say, let alone how I say it, is through writing it. And maybe I feel more confident through my writing versus through verbally speaking because when I write shit, I don't have to worry about burdening people with my thoughts; they'll either read them, or they won't, and oftentimes, either way, I am none the wiser. IRL, I am able to see or hear the impact of my words (and I pay fairly close attention to that), which makes me even more careful with what I say.