Talk

At this point in my life, I'm resigned to the fact that even when I'm with other people whom I'm at least supposed to feel close to, I'm lonely. It must just be a personality trait I have (or, as I've mentioned might be the case before, maybe it's just depression). I don't know if I just think too hard all the time, and that prevents a natural rapport from forming with other people, who may not think as much. Not to imply that they're thoughtless, I just really think I think too much for my own good.

Maybe I just haven't found anyone I really connect with. Even my closest friend is someone whom I don't like to initiate communication with, generally or on more personal issues, for fear that I'll bore her or that she has better things to do and I'll simply inconvenience her, nevermind that she seems to call me whenever the mood strikes her. Of course, that we now live in different cities most of the year means that we've grown a part since we graduated high school, but that's expected. For some reason though, I have yet to make any genuine friends over the past 2 years of attending this university, although I think, think, that things may be slowly changing.

But even still, I hate to initiate personal conversations with people. I generally assume that, because they have no reason to care about me before becoming genuine friends, they have no interest in what I have to say. Not even that I often have personal things to say; I don't do much, all said and done, and I often end up the listener in conversations because of that. Of course for that to happen, people need to be willing to open up and talk to me in the first place, ergo, I have to make myself at least seem interesting enough to reach that level of interpersonal relationship, which I don't like doing for the aforementioned reason of inflicting boredom and taking up others' time. I know that people learn that others care for them by trusting that shared private information will remain private (i.e., they expect to share/exchange information); it's sort of a tit for tat, but I'd far rather offer a tit than...give...a...tat(?).

Does this all sound crazy? And if not, am I just so socially inept that I can't tell that everyone has already learned how to finesse this whole thing over?

Then I wonder if I just have trust issues. My older brother, who is probably my closest friend (even if we rarely talk much about personal things, and it's only usually an hour-or-2-long phone call every month or so), never outted me for years, and essentially allowed me to come out to our parents on my own terms, which I did (although he hasn't come out to them, yet). But he did, upon a relay of text messages about 3 1/2 years ago, tell my parents that I had attempted suicide a year prior to that. Maybe having myself "outted" in this way by a person who I had long considered something of a confidante shook my ability to trust people with personal information.

However, the first thing that still comes to mind as preventing me from talking with others, or more specifically initiating conversations, it that I assume people don't care about what I have to say. Not to mention that, if you start a conversation about yourself with someone else, you're saying that you think at least highly enough of yourself to presuppose that this person you're conversing with ought to care about you. And we've already established that I lack most of even this base level of self-confidence. But you'd think, given all the media through which we now have to engage with other people, I'd have some means with which I felt comfortable talking with others. Then again, maybe you wouldn't; after all, on the other side of that forum/blog/facebook post is a thinking individual who's going to evaluate you and what you say, and choose to either engage or ignore you as he/she pleases. That gets back to the self-esteem thing, which bla bla bla....

Nonetheless, part of a person's self-image is built around feedback from others. By depriving myself, am I simply low on input as to what sort of person I am, and thus have largely been responsible for my own self-image? And if that's the case, you can see how problematic that would be given the self-esteem thing bla bla bla....

Ugh, even on this online journal-type-thing, I assume that no one would ever be interested in reading all this. After all, why would they be? It's only me.