So all my life I’ve been the kind of person that shuts down a conversation. This can be a valuable skill when used deliberately, but usually it’s very much unintentional – I’ll contribute to a conversation and it just… ends.
Usually this happens with people I don’t know particularly well/at all – the typical example would be in a party with a bunch of strangers, but there are other semi-social occasions where it would be nice not to kill a conversation dead before it’s even started.
I also seem to give off an aura of “don’t talk to me” – again this isn’t always a bad thing, but often enough it would be nice to be approached in the appropriate situation. Obviously due to the above conversation-stopping “skill” the prospect of doing the approaching is an anxiety-riddled nightmare for me. I had horrific social anxiety in my late teens which is much much better now, although this seems to be a hangover from that.
I don’t have these problems at work, nor with my close friends, and I have no problem maintaining a text conversation. It’s primarily in unusual group situations where I’m not entirely comfortable, and when it happens it just makes my anxiety worse, which then becomes a vicious cycle.
I struggle with interpreting social cues a lot of the time – for instance even with my friends if I say something that is pushed back on/not clearly acknowledged I can worry for days that I’ve offended them when 99% of the time they never thought twice about the original comment. There was also one occasion about 14 years ago where a former housemate said to the room at large during a party that I was “the kind of person who speaks but everyone just ignores”, which has played on my mind ever since. And so when strangers do make conversation I have a mental block to responding how I normally would with people I know, which usually results in them moving on.
So how can I stop being this unapproachable conversation killing person? Any tips for keeping a light conversation going