With strangers or acquaintances how well do you manage?
What are your main struggles with communication?
I have a difficult time maneuvering the conversation to something, i always seem to annoy people or make them really confused by me.
I would like to have incredibly deep conversations about concepts,ideas,or theories or extremely superficial ones because im scared to share myself. Shrugs dunno whats wrong with me. Cant be fake and crap as well as the mainstream.
I've been able to learn how to have what appear as "normal" or "typical" conversations with strangers or acquaintances, but if anyone looks close enough or if anyone I'm talking to wants to venture further into a topic (and thus, take a turn that I was definitely not expecting) then it becomes fairly obvious that I'm only able to have effective conversations with strangers or acquaintances when they're completely superficial.
I began to learn this after discovering that when people pass other people on the street or a hallway and say, "Hey! How's it going?" or "Hi! What's up?" that they're asking for a canned response and not someone's life story up to that moment.
In other words, I've been steadily crafting lines of well-practiced dialogues and monologues since I was about 16 or 17. This has enabled me to have mostly pain-free experiences when checking in for an appointment at the doctor's office, purchasing movie tickets or food, and other things of that nature.
What it doesn't help, though, is when I'm forced to be around that same person for longer than approximately five minutes because I quickly run out of material and struggle with what is appropriate to talk about, when it's my turn to speak, when I might be boring someone but they're trying to be polite (or maybe even not so polite) about it, and how to get across information that's potentially important or imminent.
The above becomes super apparent whenever I start a new job or, in the past, whenever I began a new course at university. Group work was and is a nightmare because I can't predict what someone is going to say and that means I have to process what they
do say and say something efficient in response in a time frame that is almost always too fast for me.
It's different with people in my life who are not strangers or acquaintances because I've been around them more and begin to pick up on their usual responses and reactions, but humanity is perpetually random and unpredictable so it's not an exact science.